If it was 'Scotland the Brave' I'll eat my hat:

"The arrival, which was greeted by the strains of Scotland the Brave from a lone piper, was watched by a rank of photographers and reporters."

19/12/00 - Typical; you leave the country and they find a skeleton.  Actually it's a little too far from Sheffield but it made the local news:

"A MURDERED man whose skeleton was found on North-East farmland may have been the victim of an underworld execution, it was revealed last night. The remains... were discovered at the edge of a field near Bolam, seven miles from Darlington, County Durham, on Wednesday."

""every time I click an email link, outlook express opens up. some of my customers don't use outlook, can you please change the  link to make other email programs open up as well... i know that some of my customers use hotmail.. please make their hotmail  accounts open up. thanks"

  the cup of coffee i'm drinking is smarter!"

"Having long been genuine admirers of the United States Postal Service (USPS), which gives amazingly reliable service especially compared with many other countries, our team of investigators decided to test the delivery limits of this immense system. We knew that an item, say, a saucepan, normally would be in a package because of USPS concerns of entanglement in their automated machinery. But what if the item were not wrapped? How patient are postal employees? How honest? How sentimental? In short, how eccentric a behavior on the part of the sender would still result in successful mail delivery?"

Again the direct location of the .mov file.

15/12/00 - Moving Yorkshire forward by promoting great design.

14/12/00 - Not everyone is a fan of Anthony Lane: (via Arts Journal)

"But there?s the occasional example of film writing so extravagantly awful that my forbearance snaps and irritated silence bows to professional pride. Such a grating instance is Anthony Lane?s review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the Dec. 11 New Yorker. As a piece of prose, Lane?s polite rave for Ang Lee?s film is competent enough, if typically gaseous and cute. But as film criticism it?s something far less innocuous, a riot of errors and absurdities that would make the shoddiest webzine blush."

"1 Great Britain

Small American dependency located approximately 5,000 miles outside Galveston, Texas. (Think Puerto Rico, except with funny accents.) State governor understood to have Democratic sympathies; Palm Beach-style ballot papers in forthcoming general election could be the answer here.
...
16 Florida

Unpredictable independent republic bordering Alabama. Ruling junta is thought to be sympathetic to a Bush White House, but has yet to embrace American principles of democracy and fair elections, and is highly vulnerable to coups d'état. One for the CIA, perhaps?"

"Hamilton said "I'm guttered, absolutely guttered". After a night of lashing rain and wind, the City boss added: "It's a wild night and the game's going nowhere, it's 0-0,  it's a point a piece and we've made an error like that". "We've done that a couple of times this year and it's a learning process"."

The French, specifically the Watch Bitches(!), don't like it either:

"Not only have the French banned our meat, but now they're trying to ban risqué fashion photography starring British models."

13/12/00 - After Beaver College changes its name could it be Babes-Bolyai University next?

13/12/00 - British folk music making a resurgence?  Some attitudes die-hard:

"To my own friends and family, it is a standing joke that when my house is burgled, or the car broken into, my folk CDs are left untouched. Whenever a review album arrives at work - I have been The Daily Telegraph's folk critic for 12 years - colleagues snigger about "Randall's dodgy diddle-dee music"."

13/12/00 - Ruth Shalit up to her old tricks:

"Ruth Shalit's "The Name Game," a November 1999 feature for Salon.com about the cutthroat world of corporate branding, was written in her trademark style: biting, witty, and full of big words. "Welcome to big-league corporate naming," she wrote, "a Pynchonesque netherworld of dueling morphemes, identity buckets and full-scale linguistic sabotage." Many of those interviewed in the story, however, contend that it is Shalit -- once a rising star at The New Republic until she was twice caught plagiarizing there -- who is the linguistic saboteur."

13/12/00 - A picture to spoil anyone's evening.  (And I think the answer is a most definite 'NO!')

13/12/00 - Powerpuff Girls meet Maxfield Parrish: (second page of pics)

13/12/00 - Honeyguide summarises a new way to poke and peek us:

"Extending the idea further, the researchers suggest that a site could set a "cache cookie" by getting you to cache a piece of data -- say, a one-pixel gif -- that serves as a token for some information about you -- say, that you bought something on their site. Unlike a regular web cookie, the cache cookie could be "read" by any other site on the internet. Sites could agree on conventions for what each cache cookie means, and thereby exchange secret messages about you. In a way, it's an updated version of a very old trick for sending secret messages: send innocuous signals in public after agreeing on what they mean in private. ("If you discover that the Federal Reserve is secretly run by bees, send me a recipe.")"

"Like snow falling in the forest on a winter's night, well-designed software should be silent and beautiful... silent in that it should perform smoothly and faultlessly and beautiful in that it should be a joy to use and easy to understand.

We at White Forest Software pride ourselves in our ability to create software that performs all tasks asked of it within an elegant and intuitive interface."

13/12/00 - Simpsons Monopoly.

13/12/00 - A pretty interesting report on British attitudes to swearing in society and on television. [warning: PDF only]

The Register reduces it to its purest form: Rudest words in Britain. (via Robot Wisdom)

13/12/00 - Yes!  The brilliant John West commercial is online. [warning: Quicktime] (via lukelog)
The actual .mov file is here if you don't want to view it with a plug-in.

13/12/00 - That's one tough Father Christmas:

"That behaviour seems to have been misconstrued by Father Christmas who seems to have thought that Mr Philpott was stealing his presents.  Mr Philpott then found himself on what can only be described as an unseasonal kicking. Mr Philpott got bruises on his legs, so he retaliated."

10/12/00 - As Above mentions Martin Parr's Boring Postcards.  Which sets me on  a search leading coincidentally to both Southampton and Luleå.  There are some good boring postcard collections here and here and here.  But hats off to the University of Southampton's Christmas Cards: