"Julie Burchill is vitriolic about you every week in her newspaper column (or so it would seem). How does this make you feel?
...
Bewildered. It's like having a stalker. Presumably she can write about anything in the world, so I don't understand her fascination with someone whom she split up with 15 years ago. Someone she has had no contact with since, and whom she doesn't even really know. I honestly don't get it. Why is she so interested? Has nothing happened to her since 1984? I think it's her way of having some kind of relationship with me. Let it go, sister. Move on. Try to stop thinking about me. Get a life somewhere beyond Memory Lane."

14/1/00 - Are you a nerd?  (via Gesyndiceerde)

I rate between Steve Jobs and Marilyn Manson; it could be worse.

14/1/00 - Interview with Chris Tarrant, presenter of the British version of 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?':

"He admits Millionaire is more Trivial Pursuit than Mastermind, but denounces people who criticise it for being lowbrow as "sad bastards"."

"All fourteen Florida school districts that have taught high school courses in "Bible History" since 1997 – 20% of the state's school districts – have been violating the U.S. Constitution by teaching the Bible from a religious perspective, using the Bible as if it were a history textbook or otherwise failing to provide objective and secular instruction."

"Students at Vanguard High School in the Marion County school district and at Williston High School in the Levy County school district were asked the following exam question during a study of I Corinthians: "Why is it hard for a non-Christian to understand things about God?" "

"Faithful find vision of Virgin of Guadalupe in spilled ice cream"

"Last supper ... Christ's face appears on base of pudding's foil wrapper"

14/1/00 - A little more detail on the CBS logo brouhaha.

13/1/00 - The flip side to linking without credit, giving credit to the wrong weblog.  I'm pretty sure I didn't link this.

Gewgaw does have good stuff on Bitch which I read cover to cover over the New Year.  The fantastic drawing which is mentioned was a little too graphic to read on a crowded plane though.

13/1/00 - Gratuitous pig link: hog wrestling!

13/1/00 - Someone with a Tallahassee connection was recently buried here, jazz cornet player Nathaniel 'Nat' Adderley.  A little more cultural than that other adopted son, Burt Reynolds.

13/1/00 - The Telegraph has a series of pictures that, in their words, 'have been suppressed, manipulated or banned altogether.'  The one that to me is the most disturbing is this picture of a torchlight procession of the Ku Klux Klan at the Festival of Britain (think World's Fair).  This was 1951!

13/1/00 - It may be a one-joke band but the music is good.  The Zambonis are featured at CNN.

13/1/00 - Michael Moore on Pauline Kael's bad review of 'Roger & Me':

"What was so incredibly appalling and shocking is how she printed outright lies about my movie. I had never experienced such a brazen, bald-faced barage of disinformation. She tried to rewrite history, saying that Flint had not lost 30,000 General Motors jobs, that it was only -- only! -- 10,000! She wrote that I had rearranged the chronology, that places like AutoWorld were built before the GM layoffs. She wrote that a few things in the film never happened, like the cash register being stolen when Reagan visited a restaurant in Flint.

Her complete fabrication of the facts was so weird, so out there, so obviously made-up, that my first response was this must be a humor piece she had written."

13/1/00 - This made me laugh, a bit:

"Some people with nothing better to do are clucking about CBS's decision to digitally erase NBC's logo in Times Square during its New Year's telecasts. The image over Dan Rather's shoulder was replaced with a CBS image. CBS News president Andrew Heyward said he'd never show the NBC logo on his network, with one exception: "If somebody uses the NBC logo to commit a murder, we wouldn't cut it out." "

Julie Burchill quotes.  [warning: really lame]

More quotes under a worrying title:

"Great quotes to inspire, empower and motivate you to live the life of your dreams and become the person you've always wanted to be! "

"The amazing thing is that, despite having been a professional writer for twenty years and earning more money than a whole suburb of stockbrokers, Julie Burchill still claims to be working class. I don't know what her definition of working class is, but it's probably something to do with roots and emblems and synthetic solidarity."

13/1/00 - What I don't understand about this is how come the Navy needs to practice bombing trees?

"We have an important opportunity in our own backyard to shut down the Navy bombing range in the Ocala National Forest. The contract between the Forest Service and the Navy expires in December 2000. Join the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice on Saturday, February 19th in saying "NO!!!" to a renewal of the contract."

"Word of the Year 1999 was Y2K. 

Word of the 1990s Decade was web. 

 Word of the Twentieth Century was jazz. 

Word of the Past Millennium was she."

"The informative production history on the DVD tell us that Welles was in a sense as "missing" as his character at certain pivotal points in the film. When he arrived in Vienna, he apparently disliked the sewer system and demanded a studio version be built in England. When Welles fled, the ingenious Reed improvised, casting assistant director Guy Hamilton as Harry Lime in shadow, having him dress in a black coat and hat and run across an arc light to project that large ominous shadow."

"The apparently haphazard switching between black and white and color footage in the film is not for any particular artistic reason on Anderson's part, but for monetary reasons. Anderson shot the film out of sequence, and by the time he reached the end of shooting, he had gone over budget. To save money, the rest of the scenes were shot with cheaper black and white stock."

The picture Mr. Blackwell is holding here makes her look like a circus clown.

Mr Blackwell's own webpage doesn't look too hot itself, for some reason it's here.  And as an extra bonus, from his autobiography:

"In 1940 he was introduced to Tyrone Power and the two men had a relationship, sharing what he calls "romantic moments" in Power's dressing room. In his autobiography, Blackwell devotes just two paragraphs to his relationship with Power. On the next page he briefly describes a short triangular relationship with Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, when they shared a Santa Monica beach house."

13/1/00 - A slightly less free country.  (via Obscure Store)

13/1/00 - The mullet has been featured often in weblogs, but what about the worst hairstyle ever?  The comb-over.  This article (in Britain) claims that the comb-over is the latest hot style:  (via Pith and Vinegar)

"The phenomenon is most obvious in New York. There, in homage to mayor Rudi Giuliani and his slathered strands, Manhattanites are painstakingly growing one side of their hair as long as 10 inches - a tortuous process, as every comber-over knows. The Wall Street Journal is hailing the lop-sided look as "the most elegant baldness remedy of them all"."

A search for other bad comb-overs comes up remarkably empty.  Some nominees include William F. Buckley, Jr., courtesy of The Tongue, Congressman Steve Chabot, courtesy of the Cincinnati Enquirer, and Jeff Van Gundy, contributed anonymously. 

8/1/00 - Some scientists have more problems getting good data than others:  (via Honeyguide)

"Berger and Cunningham had to devise a way to put scents under a moose's nose and then measure how they reacted. But moose tend to live in remote forests and don't mingle casually with humans.
...But in the end, going undercover as a moose seemed to be the only solution."

8/1/00 - V89's Top 50 albums of the year as voted for by the DJs.

8/1/00 - It's nice to see that CNNSI makes an effort to cover non-American sports but it's easy to tell what is more popular:

Poll question:  Who had the more impressive Sugar Bowl?  Total:  13242 votes
Poll question:  What is most to blame for David Beckham's woes?  Total:  681 votes

If the second one had a 'Who the hell is David Beckham?' option they might do better.  [Warning: photo of Alex Ferguson sans shirt]

8/1/00 - One of those 'oh if I only had the money' situations.

8/1/00 - Jeff Mangum (of Neutral Milk Hotel) also does a bit of art.  (via UNPOPULAR)

8/1/00 - Oh I'm sure they loved this:

6/1/00 - The Onion's Least Essential Albums of the '90s.  (via Bring The Rock)

6/1/00 - Warning:  Dumb views expressed here.  (via email)

6/1/00 - All the latest on the Year2000.com auction fiasco.  (via alt0169)

6/1/00 - A handy link to complement the Late Night page is Brill's Content's Tube Scan.

Some in-depth reporting this evening:

"CBS News 48 Hours - "Family Feuds" - And exploration of outrageous family feuds. Brothers Harle and Donald Tinney fight to keep their adopted brother from inheriting a family mansion, brother and sister Nina Sells and Rick Schmidt compete in the barbecue restaurant business in Texas, and Family Feud host, Louie Anderson is making a movie about his family struggles."

As it says though, some give him more slack:

"The strips in the ’60s were definitely the best period, much more imaginative," says Dan Perkins (a.k.a. Tom Tomorrow), creator of This Modern World. "But my gosh, he certainly earned his place on the page, and he could do it as long as he wanted, as far as I’m concerned. Even in its decline, Peanuts outshone just about everything else on the page. I mean, Garfield could shut down tomorrow and I wouldn’t give a s*** about that."

"I despise those shallow religious comics," he said. "Dennis the Menace, for instance, is the most shallow. When they show him praying--I just can't stand that sort of thing, talking to God about some cutesy thing that he'd done during the day. I don't think Hank Ketcham [Dennis' creator] has any deep knowledge of things like that."

6/1/00 - The whole of 'Steal This Book' by Abbie Hoffman. [warning: 400K file]  (via Bovine Inversus)

6/1/00 - The really important questions answered:  (via Arts & Letters Daily)

"How do the stars manage to keep warm in all their skimpy dresses?...
We have to make sure that the access to the party is really easy so that they can get straight from the car into the venue with minimal time in the cold."

5/1/00 - The reality of life in Norfolk.  (via email)

5/1/00 - Other sites that claim 'The View From Here' as theirs.

A view on an art site.  A more typical photography site.  'The View From Here' is not immune from Mammon.  But some people dress it up a bit.  When I get slack at updating I can always take heart.  The Christian view or the Jewish view.  Standard boring homepage.

The best thing was an article on this site.  Which lead to this story about Beacon Hill, just down the road, where the time zone runs right through the middle of the town:

"Eastern / Central - What's the Difference? Around here, Eastern Time is refered to as "Fast Time" and Central is "Slow Time." People who work in Beacon Hill, Port St. Joe and White City ("Fast") get up an hour earlier, get off work an hour earlier, and have an extra hour of daylight in the evening. People who work in Panama City and Mexico Beach, or simply on the west side of Overstreet Road in Beacon Hill are "Slow" and they sleep in an extra hour. They watch the 6 O'clock news at 5 O'clock and the Tonight Show at 10 p.m."

5/1/00 - Can this be really true?  (From a fairly interesting story about photographing babies at Wal-Mart.)

"Doctors recommend that a baby not be brought into a store like Wal-Mart for about six weeks. The number and variety of germs in such a place, much less the concentrated germ population of a photographer's table, is a bit much for an infant's still-developing immune systems."

5/1/00 - Part two of Spike's roundup.

5/1/00 - Far out quotes from the Far Right.  (via Looka!)

5/1/00 - A short article on data mining on the Web.

5/1/00 - The good news is that W. Somerset Maugham is having a story filmed, Up at the Villa.  The bad news is that it is being done by the creators of Angels and Insects.  (At least it doesn't have Patsy Kensit.)

You can read Of Human Bondage online.

5/1/00 - Mmm, tiffin.  Not what Sid James had in mind.