Black is the new Green (according to Google)

http://www.blackle.com/


It sounds like a wind-up - probably because the logic of it is so beguilingly simply and obvious. Some bright spark (or possibly some much more eco-friendly, less energy-consuming dim spark) at Google has pointed out that powering all those white pixels on Google's front end is more energy-intensive than leaving them all black. Hence, Blackle - Google's search, but in black. Individually, each screen won't save much... but there's an awful lot of people using Google. Cute.

BMW publishes 'The Secret Life of Cars'

Via dezeen:

BMW have just published a report entitled 'The Secret Life of Cars' (download the 3.3MB pdf
here). On one level, it's a long paean to BMW dressed up as research; and there are a few places where some juicy nugget of information has, one suspects, been deleted (I can spot at least one reference to a paragraph no longer there). But there's still some interesting stuff. I especially liked the guy describing how the seating arrangements in British cars varied according to class:


"My American friend sent me a description of where English couples sit in cars. It made me laugh because it's so true. It said with a working class couple the two men sit up front and the women behind. With a middle class couple one couple sit in the front with the man driving and the wife in the passenger seat. And if its an upper class couple the couples mix up so one man drives and the other man's wife sits in the front. Genius."

There are also some interesting observations about who we allow in front of us (small cars let other small cars in, women are more likely to let others in, etc) - although it seemed obvious to me that similar cars are more likely to be polite to each other. After all, the drivers have something in common already.


I do, however, harbour a secret suspicion that every driver quoted is a BMW driver.

Full emotional disclosure - in infomatic form.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/59770086/

One suspects that Hell might have no fury like a woman reduced to six symbols on a chart.

Like ships in the night (52º23'01''...)

http://platial.com/paiges/map/1535#hopeless_romantic_map
Ah, the romantic notions conjured forth... such sweet little messages!

Tour de France 2007 - Prologue

I had an unscheduled trip to London this weekend, where (as luck would have it) about a zillion other people had also decided to spend their time. Also, as luck would have it, it was the Tour de France. I suspect these two might have been related.

Anyway, I spent a considerable part of Saturday up a tree, with my camera, taking photos of the time trials which preceded the race proper. I'm afraid I got a little trigger-happy - I managed to take something like one hundred and fifty photos before the battery died. This is a selection of the best, from which you can infer the number of photos I shot which consisted entirely of some blurred pavement.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
I'm sure all you star-nuts (yeah I'm thinking of you, charl) will already be aware of this, but I only just found it. It's full of lovely images, and (if I read the jargon correctly), there's a little program which downloads a new one each day and makes it into your PC wallpaper.

A little bit of greetings-card philosophy

I've been rereading Andrew Smith's Moondust - an excellent book for anyone even vaguely interested in the Apollo moonlandings, by the way, when I accidentally misread the phrase " I realise how few people I know who might be described as happy, and how much time I've spent beng unnecessairly less than that myself". I thought it said:

"I realise how few people I know who might be described as happy, and how much time I've spent being unnecessarily less than myself"...

....and I would have gone on thinking that that was what it said, and nodding to myself at the profundity of it, if I hadn't checked the quote in order to post it here. Hah. Still, for some reason, the misquote chimes more deeply with me than the actual one.

Hello random people!

Over the last few months, I've noticed a distinct pick-up in the number of Multiply people who, despite being entirely unrelated (and generally being in some far-distant part of the world) have randomly found their way to my homepage. Hello you random people! Welcome!

Feel free to say hello back... I'm very curious as to how you ended up here.

(I've also noticed there must be a fair few non-Multiply people stopping by, too. Hello to you too! I'm sorry there's no way for you to leave comments - mind you, you're all probably related to me anyway so you can just jolly well use email, or pop over for a cup of tea)

Review: Happy Gilmore

I watched 'Happy Gilmore' at the weekend. It's a gentle comedy about a talentless but fixated hockey player who tries his hand at golf and turns out to be a genius - but stil treats it like an ice hockey match. It's perfectly watchable - Adam Sandler is, well, Adam Sandler, and the acting - what little there is of it - is perfectly passable. The script, similarly, is pretty much okay - par for the course (sorry) when it comes to this sort of comedy genre. Nothing wrong there, either. Sure, it's all a little lightweight, but hey, it's a lightweight movie.


And yet it was bad.

It took me a while to work out why. I mean, the performances are okay, the script is okay, the camera work seems fine - what else is there? And yet I came away unsatisfied. Only much later did I realize - this movie has been irretrievably mauled by its editor. The editing is not merely bad, it is execrable. People turn up in places with no explanation of how they got there, and no buildup to their arrival. The movie takes far too long to build to the showdown, which is then over all too quickly. Somewhere, I feel certain, there is enough footage on some cutting room floor to make good these shortcomings - but for some reason the editors decided to leave in unnecessarily long sequences of Granny Gilmore being terrorized in her old folks' home.


This was a new one on me. Whenever I've seen bad films before, it was because the acting was wooden, or the script dreadful (or the sets, or the continuity, or the effects...). For someone to have edited a film, retained a decent-sounding script, and yet have successfully avoided any dramatic tension or coherence, is not something I've come across before. It was an educational experience. Thanks to Happy Gilmore, I've discovered a whole different way in which a film can fail.