It's amazing how big he still is in France. Posters in bars, on the telly all the time, huge sections devoted to him in otherwise hip second-hand record shops... every time I see him, I think 'I bet Cliff Richard is really jealous'.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 3:06 PM on August 24, 2009

That looks sort of like fives, with all the fun taken out - in fives, the court is enclosed on three sides, with a ledge running around all three walls, plus (in Eton fives, as opposed to Rugby) a low butress wall that juts into the court near the front, in line with a step that splits the court into two levels. All these obstacles can be used to amazing effect - there are so many angled corners on the court that you can ping the ball all over the place before it hits the ground, hopefully... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 12:46 PM on August 3, 2009

I predict that the final edited together movie will be better than the Phantom Menace.

I predict that the final edited together movie will be better than Star Wars: A New Hope.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 2:52 PM on July 29, 2009

To be fair to them, once it was out it was handled reasonably well

Yep, Jackie O did handle it very well, and sounded genuinely concerned. But that doesn't really absolve her, since she presumably agreed beforehand that submitting a 14 year old girl to a barrage of intrusive questions about her private life live on radio was a good plan.

But the mother, knowing that her daughter was raped at 12, and then deciding that taking... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 3:37 AM on July 29, 2009

Article consisting of random stock photos

Not only that, but I'd bet money this is a Travelodge press release rewrite. Whoever does press for Travelodge is very, very good at getting hotel- and travel-related human interest stories into the UK papers - 'OAP couple stay in Travelodge for years because it's cheaper than sheltered accomodation' and 'teens can't find top tourist destinations on map' being a couple of recent ones. Once you notice this, it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:41 AM on July 28, 2009

Paedogeddon.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 10:31 AM on July 22, 2009

POOL'S CLOSED

A comment that perfectly encapsulates the reported incident, the swimming club's response, and every contentious comment in this thread.

What do we call that?

Echanysterical?

An h4iku?
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:00 PM on July 9, 2009

my favourite film is This Is England – it’s about skinheads, but they’re not really racist, because one of them is a black kid. They turn on him in the end, but because he was one of the gang they’re not really racist. They just believe in what they believe in.

I really hope Shane Meddows, the cast and the crew never see that. It's just unbelievable that someone could see that wonderful, funny, moving, emphatically anti-racist film and misunderstand it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:26 PM on July 6, 2009

It never crossed my mind that this could be made-up. I mean, the leaked BNP membership list included members described as Former policeman. Lecturer in human rights/data protection. and Will not be renewing 07 (objects to being told he shouldn't wear a bomber jacket).

That's the thing about contemporary fascists, they're so bloody ludicrous its impossible to spot a parody. A dangerous thing, admittedly - the BNP are... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:39 PM on July 6, 2009

btw: i opened culturekitchen in 2000 as a static writing-log. i set up the blog literally at the end of December 2001 and by 2002 was blogging. i never know if am in the last batch of the first wave or the first batch of the second wave of bloggers :D

I started a weblog in 2002 as well, and always thought I was part of the third wave - with the exception of Scripting News, I didn't know about any of the first wave weblogs until folk... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 1:28 PM on July 6, 2009

Brilliant post, Jo Beese.

A friend of mine works for a telly company best known for making formulaic reality/game show programmes, flogging the format to the US, then re-importing the US versions. Apparently, when the US-made shows are prepared for broadcast over here, as well as recording new voice-overs and adding those 'some scenes created for entertainment purposes!' warnings, they have a lot of hassle editing scenes with racist backing music - she's mentioned this... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 4:44 PM on June 7, 2009

The paintings are really not my cup of tea, but the X-Files artwork is fun, and sort of giddily over-enthusiastic.

Is there a name for that genre of cartoony, faux-naive, sometimes neo-primitive stuff, invariably replete with huge-eyed children and fantastic animals? (Privately, I know it as 'the cack-handed art they link to on Boing Boing', though Kim at least seems a couple of notches above that.)
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 6:06 AM on December 18, 2008

a mashing of Weimar expressionism (Dix) and manga/super-d

Dix had never occurred to me as an influence on this stuff, but now that you point it out it's forehead-slappingly obvious. Funny how that can happen.

from going to too many openings around here

It's a strictly American, mostly West Coast thing, right? I just can't imagine a serious gallery in the UK or Europe putting on a show... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 10:17 AM on December 19, 2008

The underlining on the links made me think this was going to be about the British Electric Foundation. And Garry Glitter singing Suspicious Minds is much more fun than this.

(It's sort of cute, I suppose, but I can't help be disturbed by the idea of a grubby animal near a little baby. Full disclosure: I'd kick a puppy in the face before I let it lick mine.)
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 3:32 PM on December 18, 2008

Helicopter parenting much?

Er, I don't have kids; maybe I'll get a bit more laissez-faire about human-animal tongue-based interaction if I do. Either that or I'll pass on my perfectly sensible distaste for animals licking people. (It's not just a germ thing, it's that you can never tell what animals are going to do from one moment to the next - I'd have the same qualms about an obviously deranged or high person trying to lick my face.)
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 4:27 PM on December 18, 2008

My uncle is blind in one eye thanks to that manufactured fear of germs, it has nothing whatsoever to do with toxocariasis.

(I hate the manufactured fear of germs too, especially the paranoid throwing away of perfectly good food, but I'm just not into an animal that has recently licked its own bits or heartily sniffed some shit putting its tongue on my face. Seems pretty reasonable.)
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 12:04 AM on December 19, 2008

Flagged as, I dunno, a moon's worth of double posts. A double moon's worth if you count MetaTalk.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:08 PM on December 18, 2008

It's a stupid review, but it does make me feel sort of nostalgic for the brief couple of years when I read NME and Melody Maker, did a fanzine and spent all my money on 7" singles - I thought they'd given up on that sort of thing and just acted as cheerleaders for the guitar band of the moment. (Smash Hits in its 1980s heyday left a much bigger mark on me than the 'proper' music papers, though, and their witty, acerbic, genuinely funny piss-taking was in a completely different league to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 8:51 AM on December 18, 2008

From the images, Kanevsky looks pretty bog standard to me (possibly because I saw some bloody amazing seascapes the other week), but Heichemer's paintings on photographs seem really intriguing - they remind me of Victorian spirit photography.

'Cause that's the thing about pictures of paintings - they never get all the facts.

Absolutely. Give it time, though. Technology seems to rip along at a pretty absurd pace; give it a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 3:33 PM on December 17, 2008

the admiration of crazy technical skills

Yeah, I got a bit carried away by that, but they absolutely have a 'sense of multiple exposure and motion in them' too (they're drawings of photographs), but... it just doesn't show up in the jpegs on the gallery site.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:27 PM on December 17, 2008

Thanks for the link to DOSbox, LogicalDash - I've wanted to play Commander Keen again for a while now. That may be a really lame thing to say in computer game circles, but as far as I'm concerned Commander Keen and Harrier Attack on the Amstrad CPC 464 are the only two computer games that are even remotely entertaining (ie, I can actually get to the end of the easiest level!) and I could never make the Amstrad emulator I have work properly.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:13 PM on December 17, 2008

It's an absolutely superb service. I've been cautious so far, only using it for work stuff (text files and PDFs, mostly), but it's worked so flawlessly for the past few months that I'm planning to Dropbox my whole home folder.

Wait....Windows/Mac only.

There's a Linux client too, but it's only available in the forums for now. In my experience, it's still a wee bit buggy compared to the OS X version - on my Eee PC running Ubuntu... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:32 AM on December 17, 2008

Drop Box seems to at least let you know where your stuff is, to an extent.

Not to mention that all your stuff is on your own computer(s) as well as in the 'cloud'.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:36 AM on December 17, 2008

bonaldi wrote: Yeh, jack_mo and other Mac types: don't put your whole home folder in there: dropbox silently mangles the shit out of resource forks (so fonts, weblinks etc all die) and packages (like .apps).

Yeah, I was using 'home folder' in the - possibly unique to me! - sense of 'all my plain text files and photos', which are the only things I would really cry about if something went awry. (Also resource forks tend to do my head... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 4:19 PM on December 17, 2008

mippy wrote: I spend a bit of time hanging out in cemeteries (LOLGOTH) and in Glasgow, I noticed that Euphemia was very popular at the turn of the century.

I know a Euphemia and a Euphamia, both living in Glasgow now. Pretty name, if, presumably, a nightmare at school.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 10:26 AM on December 17, 2008

Fascinating. I love the disappearing ink concept, shame the technology of the time wasn't up to it.

(I have a pair of drawings that were supposed to fade in a similar way, but one of them has been blu-tacked to my fridge for three years now and looks as crisp as it did the day I was given it - I wonder if the artist was bluffing, or if ink technology still can't do reliable disappearance.)
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 2:50 AM on December 13, 2008

Also, it's wonderful to see an artists' book that actually does something with the medium - I sort of collect them, and almost all are pretty straightforward, with reproductions/photographs of the artist's work, with an essay or text of some sort.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 2:56 AM on December 13, 2008

I was reading through the links thinking "Ooh, what a beautiful piece of engineering, what pretty valves, what dedication on the part of the restorers, &c.", then I listened to the 'sounds' MP3 and thought, "WOW!&^&(S^GbOMG!s1ظxʌɥ@*<2>11¡ɥɐǝʎ*&SjhsgCRIKEY!".

Un-fucking-believable.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 2:32 PM on December 12, 2008

On August 19th I 'blipped' The Ballad of Dorothy Parker by Prince. Or so the site tells me, I have no memory of signing up or even hearing of blip.fm before. Anyway, it looks interesting. I wonder how long it'll take me to forget all about it this time?
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 8:58 AM on December 10, 2008

Also, this is a bit like RadioPop, a clever 'social radio listening' thingy from the BBC Radio Labs that lets you track what you listen to on the radio and 'pop' the programmes you like (I think they plan to make it possible to 'pop' at the song level in the future too).
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:02 AM on December 10, 2008

In Samoa, there's the Fa'afafine, boys raised as girls for practical reasons (not enough girl children in the family to do traditionally female work). The old cultural practice has morphed into transvestite/transsexual/drag queen kids choosing to be fa'fafafine themselves.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 6:44 AM on December 10, 2008

This is the NYT crossword? Seriously? It's completely shit. You might as well do a wordsearch puzzle.

Here's a nice, frustrating crossword clue:
Player getting six, duck, then fifty batting is test opener (9)1.
There's real pleasure in solving that! The setter misdirects you towards cricket, then requires you to peer closely at every word or phrase in the sentence, considering each one in isolation until you spot a pattern, then stumping (pun... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:10 PM on December 7, 2008

jack_mo: That was a lot of trouble to go to to say "Hi, I'm British and I think you Yanks are dumb."

It was more shock that the fancy-pants broadsheet New York Times runs puzzles like this - not knowing that crosswords are a completely different kettle of fish in the US, it was like turning to page three of the Financial Times to find an airbrushed young lady with her top off.

You probably also go into... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 1:33 PM on December 8, 2008

Thanks grumblebee, that should occupy me on the train to Edinburgh tomorrow (and the train back, and the rest of this week, or however long it takes me to throw it across the room). Sondheim's puzzle is the even more devilish than usual advanced cryptic - some of the answers don't even have clues.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 2:37 PM on December 9, 2008

di Giovani's site is just chock full of great stuff. The 'Missing Borges' ("...bits of Borges that went missing when the work they were attached to was abolished from the English canon by the Borges Estate...") and 'Borges in Conversation' sections are especially good.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 2:20 PM on December 9, 2008

Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a 'Oh, come on, this is just complete bollocks' option when flagging.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 2:40 AM on December 9, 2008

mediareport wrote: Looks like Amazon UK caved; they blacked out the entire image. Here's what that album looks like.

What? No they haven't, they just have a crappy image of a completely different edition of the box set, which doesn't feature the image of the girl in the first place, and, far from being blacked out, clearly says "Axe Killers Collector's Set" above a logo. The very same deluxe box set cover is thumbnailed on the Ciao! page for... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 8:31 AM on December 8, 2008

Beautiful piece of film.

I have an old unupholstered DAR Style Bucket Chair, and it's incredibly comfy, even for my bony arse. (Admittedly I can only sit in it while wearing jeans, though - in trousers you just sort of slide right off it, which is a wee bit of a design flaw.)
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 10:28 AM on December 6, 2008

Wonderful places.

Sadly, the last grand station café I was in was the champagne bar at St. Pancras, which is a nice enough place to wait for a train, but downright naff compared to the cafés in the post. I also love the bleak cafés and abject pubs at small stations. Come to think of it, I just love train stations!
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 4:30 AM on December 6, 2008

I drink vinegar all the time. The other day I found myself adding a dash of balsamic to a little glass of white wine vinegar - just to take the edge of, you understand. (Possibly a sign that I have a problem?!) I had no idea there were vinegars designed for drinking.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 3:13 PM on December 5, 2008

I like vinegar so much, I've begun wonder if it's a physiological need.

I've wondered that too - is there anything in vinegar that we might be missing out on, due to the nature of our diets? (I eat salt a lot too - the sweet crystals of Maldon! the perfumed sel gris of the Ile de Ré! - which makes me wonder the same thing.)
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 3:48 PM on December 5, 2008

Demi-amusing. But then if I made a website about TFTD, it'd just be videos of me drinking tea in my pyjamas and intermittently muttering the word 'cunt' at a radio, so what do I know.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:26 AM on December 5, 2008

Happy Dave wrote: For those seeking context, Thought For The Day is a daily (surprise!) musing/rant/bromide from a semi-public figure, on BBC Radio 4, for about 3 minutes, usually a religious one.

Nope, it's always religious, and the BBC explicitly refuses to invite speakers to provide a TFTD from a non-religious/secular/atheist/whatever perspective. In 2002, the National Secular Society and the British Humanists complained about... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:18 AM on December 5, 2008

This is interesting, in that it's as boring as every other stranger's Twitter feed (my own included, of course).

At least Stephen Fry puts in some effort to make his Twitter stream genuinely interesting by sharing pictures of amazing lemurs he met while making a documentary, or writing capsule reviews of gadgets he's been sent.

Also, I really wish the fake Tony Benn on Twitter had been real.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:46 AM on December 4, 2008

They're giving 175 calories per beer, which is on the upper end of the scale (a 12oz Bud is about 150), and 165 for a full glass of wine (a 5oz glass of wine is about 105).

So they're about right - we drink pints of beer, and in pubs wine comes in 175ml or 250ml measures.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 8:25 AM on December 3, 2008

Quakers have been doing this for a while - at the Meeting House near me they have a Human Library, and you can book a Quaker for half an hour on Sunday afternoons. They even have a catologue, so you can pick a skeptic Quaker, or a Quaker who writes poetry, or whatever (I've been meaning to ask if they have a non-theist Quaker I could borrow).
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 8:16 AM on December 3, 2008

Yeah, as someone who spends a lot of time trawling charity shops and jumble sales for records, the idea that some crafty git might beat me to a record I've been looking for for years and then melt it into a crappy-looking candle holder makes me sick to the stomach.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:35 AM on December 2, 2008

Heh, I just noticed the title of the post.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:35 AM on December 2, 2008

Certainly, there's a tiny percentage of good records that will be sacrificed, but I promise you it will be mostly crap.

This is why it's so upsetting - the fun of buying records is spending hours looking at absolute shite, then finding something glorious. Sods law dictates that the craftsperson inspired by this post would unthinkingly pick up the one great record in amongst the thousands of rubbish ones and put it in their oven.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 10:07 AM on December 2, 2008

I do like Leckey, but his work can be a bit dry and too clever-by-half, and seemed even more so in the company of Macuga and Islam (though the latter's film of rickshaw drivers was very lovely).

I wish Cathy Wilkes had won, because her stuff makes you feel funny inside, as well as being all clever and engaged with art history and so on - call me old fashioned, but I quite like having an emotional response to art. Also because I put £20 on her to win, and this is the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 10:01 AM on December 2, 2008