http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/extras/
BBC – Comedy – Extras
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Author Archives: OldNol
Hate crimes rise after UK bombs
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/4723339.stm
In memoriam
Kamall Butt another innocent victim of the London bombings.
From the page: “Three days after the 7 July bombings, Kamal Butt, 48, from Pakistan was murdered outside a corner shop in Nottingham.
Eight juveniles and a man have been arrested.”
Escherization
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/projects/escherization/
https://web.archive.org/web/20060322021346/http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/projects/escherization/
Over his life, the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher created over a hundred ingenious tesselations in the plane. Some were simple and geometric, used as prototypes for more complex endeavors. But in most the tiles were recognizable animal forms such as birds, fish and reptiles.
Escher was able to discover such tilings through a combination of natural ability and sheer determination.
The author of this site has developed a complex algorithm that can produce reasonable solutions to the Escherization problem.
There some very good examples which I can’t show you because they are all either exceed the maximum file size or image size for stumbleupon apart from this one which is probably the poorest example on the site:
The man responsible for all this is:
Craig S. Kaplan
Assistant Professor,
Computer Graphics Lab,
School of Computer Science,
University of Waterloo,
Ontario,
Canada.
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/
He even looks clever doesn’t he?
And just to prove how clever he is he even lets you play at making your own compositions using a java applet here: http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/software/penrose/
and it’s it was a lot of fun, enjoy!
iCab – Internet Taxi for the Mac
Update 2022 – I used this browser for a while but to be honest it hasn’t kept up with the main Mac browsers like safari and Chrome.
Also as shareware it doesn’t make sense to pay for something that you can get free elsewhere.
The additional features such as kiosk mode, malware alerts, download manager, source code viewer etc. are also available elsewhere at no cost.
The Chap – MAGAZINE
http://www.thechap.net
From the site:
What, dear friends, has become of our culture?
Was not this once a country where jazz beatniks rubbed shoulders with aged philosophers in smoky cafeterias?
Did not dapper men in horn-rimmed spectacles once explain the mysteries of the world to us via our crackling wireless sets?
Were not public libraries the places where all human knowledge was to be found, at the fingertips of avuncular librarians swaddled in tweed? Where has all this gone?
Replaced, we are told, by the “information superhighway”.
“Information?”
What sort of “information” is conveyed by religious zealots, unclothed harlots and medical charlatans?
Many thanks to
http://hat.stumbleupon.com/
for finding this excellent stumble!
Update 2022:
There is an equivalent Youtube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/Gentlemansgazette
Le Monde : Actualité
C’est un journal francais
The Great Wall
http://www.cocaart.com/e-gallery/online/20021222/20021207a.html
Updated 2022: you can find some of my own photos taken at the Shanghai Pass here
Sagittarius
Uncle Nolli’s Feng-shui Astral Horoscopes
http://yahooligans.yahoo.com/content/ecards/address?g=27&c=193
Sagittarius: 23 November-21 December:
Confusion tomorrow when the tray in your CD player suddenly begins to leak
apple juice. Luckily it’s still under guarantee. And the apple juice will
keep for three days if refrigerated.
Lucky shampoo: Wash & Go 2-in-1.
eclectech
Cue Lady Bracknell
http://eclectech.co.uk/b3ta/handbag.jpg.html
Memorable Quotes from
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.
Jack: Actually, I was found.
Lady Bracknell: Found?
Jack: Uh, yes, I was in… a handbag.
Lady Bracknell: A handbag?
Jack: Yes, it was…
[makes gestures]
Jack: an ordinary handbag.
“Bloody Vikings!”
Prime Minister’s Questions July 13th 2005 reaction to 7/7
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/cm050713/debtext/50713-03.htm
Prime Ministers Questions July 13th 2005
Michael Howard: “I am sure that I speak for the whole House when I join the Prime Minister in expressing our sympathy to those who have suffered such terrible losses, and in the congratulations that he has offered to the police and the security services on the outstanding work that they have carried out following last week’s tragic events.
What we now know is appalling to contemplate. It will take us a long time to come to terms with the fact that these atrocities appear to have been committed by those who were born and brought up in our midst. Does the Prime Minister agree that those responsible for last week’s carnage were not acting in the name of Islam but were perverting its teachings? Will he join me and the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) in condemning the attacks that have taken place on mosques?
Is it not the case that anyone who reaches for a stone to throw at the window of a mosque and anyone who nurtures resentment against our Muslim community is the enemy of us all, because they would be acting in the way the terrorists want us to act, thus helping them to achieve their objective of dividing us one from another? “
Killer in the classroom
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1442457/posts
Mohammad Sidique Khan the ‘Killer in the classroom’
`it gets a little closer every day.
Suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, working as a teaching mentor in a classroom at a school in the Beeston area of Leeds.
The last couple of weeks have been mindnumbing.
The hope of Live8, the sucess of London 2012, the horror of the London Bombings and then the unsettling relevations that there were Al Qaeda operatives amongst us.
We aren’t talking 6 degrees of separation, and by that I mean I was in the same room as Mohammad Sidique Khan a year or so ago. At the time I didn’t converse with him just said ‘Hello’.
Some of my friends and colleagues actually worked with them. I have great difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that this man was working in a caring profession – working with Special Needs Children.
This man:
Magdy el-Nashar is a suspect and is currently in gaol in Cairo until just before the bombings he was resident in Leeds. I know he is a very devout muslim and tried to convert most people he met. He certainly knew at least one of the bombers and holding a doctorate in biochemistry had the knowledge and skills to make the explosive triacetone triperoxide that was used. Large amounts of bomb making equipment was found in a flat he rented, and he left the UK three days before the attacks took place.
Is he one of them?
He worked with people very close to me.
He will be investigated and I trust the West Yorkshire Police to be fair.
Any of these bastards that are given a fair trial and found guilty will to my mind suffer a fate worse than death. They will languish in one of Her Majesties prisons for a very long time locked up with hundreds of violent British criminals who will spend many long hours devising ingenious ways to torment them when the ‘screws’ aren’t looking.
I’m not usually given to such dark thoughts as these but I’m glad that despite recent events I do not want to see the return of capital punishment and judicial murder.
Grrrrrrs favorite websites – StumbleUpon
http://grrrrrr.stumbleupon.com/
Grrrrrr – another of my favorite StumbleUpon colleagues with a nice collection of websites and interesting links
https://web.archive.org/web/20051119032424/http://grrrrrr.stumbleupon.com/
Anybody who likes Magazine, Derren Brown and the Rockall Times gets a Thumbs Up from me.
the very model of a modern labour minister
http://eclectech.co.uk/b3ta/clarkeidcardswallpaper.jpg.html
Mr Clarke is the very model of a modern labour minister
A musical animation that made me laugh because it has…
“a hint of politics and opinion, a dapper dog singing and the cutest puppy pianist on the planet.”
http://eclectech.co.uk/clarkeidcards.php
Update 2022:
rather dated now but funny nevertheless – a classic example of satire a la UK.
Incidentally, I’m a bit embarassed about the virtue signalling. Quite frankly I don’t really care what happens to the UK now.
almost
Al Qaeda on my doorstep, well almost
Earlier today one of my students told me that his street had been cordoned off and that an arrest connected to the London bombings had been made.
Since I’ve been teaching here for many years and we now know that the bombers were from Leeds there’s an outside chance that I may have taught one of the bombers in the past – makes you think doesn’t it?
This week I is mostly listening to….
http://www.robbiewilliams.pl/wallpapers/wallpaper7big.jpg
This week I is mostly listening to…. Robbie Williams
Robbie Williams
Strong
My breath smells of a thousand fags
And when I’m drunk I dance like me dad
I’ve started to dress a bit like him
Early morning when I wake up
I look like Kiss but without the make up
And thats a good line to take it to The bridge
And you know and you know
‘Cos my life’s a mess
And I’m trying to grow so before
I’m old I’ll confess
You think that I’m strong you’re wrong
You’re wrong
I’ll sing my song, my song, my song
My bed’s full of takeaways and fantasies of easy lays
The pause button’s broke on my video
And is this real ‘cos I feel fake, Oprah Winfrey, Ricky Lake
Teach me things I don’t need to know
And you know and you know
‘Cos my life’s a mess
And it starting to show so before
I’m old I’ll confess
You think that I’m strong you’re wrong
You’re wrong
I’ll sing my song my song my song
If I did it all again I’d be a nun
The rain was never cold when I was young
I’m still young we’re still young (step inside the sun)
Life’s too short to be afraid
Step inside the sun
And you know and you know
‘Cos my life’s a mess
And I’m trying to grow
hey hey !
You think that I’m strong you’re wrong
You’re wrong
I’ll sing my song my song my song
Life’s too short to be afraid
So take a pill to numb the pain
You don’t have to take the blame
Don’t wanna go down in the tube station…
http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/kimage/Koroleva.jpg
(Don’t wanna go) down in the tube station (at midnight)
The distant echo –
Of faraway voices boarding faraway trains
To take them home to
The ones that they love and who love them forever
The glazed, dirty steps – repeat my own and reflect my thoughts
Cold and uninviting, partially naked
Except for toffee wrapers and this morning’s papers
Mr. Jones got run down
Headlines of death and sorrow – they tell of tomorrow
Madmen on the rampage
And I’m down in the tube station at midnight
I fumble for change – and pull out the Queen
Smiling, beguiling
_____londonhurts’ Journal
http://www.livejournal.com/community/london_hurts?skip=20
From :_____londonhurts’ Journal
I’ve just shown this community to my father who was a Londoner (evacuated) during the war years. In the spirit of the responses here he’d like to point out.
“You youngsters don’t know how lucky you are we had to cope with tea rationing!!!”
You do your worst – and we will do our best.
I lived in London for four years during the height of the IRA bombing campaign and I once found a suspect device on a tube train and had to pull the Emergency lever to halt the train so I know how Londoners feel at the moment.
As Churchill said
“…We ask no favours of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction.
On the contrary, if tonight our people were asked to cast their vote whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of cities, the overwhelming majority would cry,
“No, we will mete out to them the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us.”
The people with one voice would say:
“You have committed every crime under the sun.
Where you have been the least resisted there you have been the most brutal.
It was you who began the indiscriminate bombing.
We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will.
You do your worst – and we will do our best.
Perhaps it may be our turn soon; perhaps it may be our turn now…”
BBC – Cult Television – to close 15 July
The BBC is to close their hugely popular Cult Television site on July 15
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/news/cult/2005/06/24/20186.shtml
The BBC has decided – as part of its “restructuring of the BBC’s online activities” – to pull the plug on its hugely popular Cult website.
Those not familiar with Cult should mosey on down and have shufti. Readers who already enjoy its eclectic mix should read the following with horror:
This site shuts next month. Bye, then!
Sadly, as part of the restructuring of the BBC’s online activities, this site is closing at the end of the month.
We’re trying to find alternative bbc.co.uk homes for some sites, but much of the content will be removed from the servers, and that which remains will not be maintained.
We’d like to thank all our users (700,000 of you last month!), and to everyone who expressed an opinion of us in the BBC’s Online Audience survey (we nearly came top – beaten only by those pesky News people).
The team have had a wonderful six years looking after the site, and hope you continue to enjoy the BBC’s online offerings.
PS: Don’t worry about the Doctor Who site. It’s safe.
That’s right – 700,000 people a month, so obviously it has to go. What’s more, much of the material faces deletion. Marvellous. As one irate punter puts it: “Who’s the bozo who made this decision?”
Orgone Accumulator – by Robert Calvert / Hawkwind
http://aural-innovations.com/robertcalvert/calvart/orgoneaccumulator.htm
http://aural-innovations.com/robertcalvert/
Crazy site about a crazy guy!
Since I got some positive feedback about Hawkwind’s Silver Machine here’s the site of Robert Calvert the driving force behind mutch of Hawkwind’s finest music.
Orgone Accumulators are, in my opinion pure ‘snake oil’ but makes for great doggerel. This site also goes really OTT on the flash mouse-overs.
Orgone accumulator by Hawkwind / Robert Calvert
I’ve got an orgone accumulator
It makes me feel greater
I’ll see you sometime later
When I’m through with my accumulator
It’s no social integrator
It’s a one man isolator
It’s a back brain stimulator
It’s a cerebral vibrator
Those energy stimulators
Just turn your eyeballs into craters
But an orgone accumulator
Is a superman creator
wangkings favorite websites – StumbleUpon
http://wangking.stumbleupon.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20051227082614/http://wangking.stumbleupon.com/
欢迎
Welcome to stumbleupon.
Update 2022:
With some people SU was always going to a bit of a joke – and like this user they dropped out fairly quickly.
However, Stumbleupon was great and very successful for a number of years. Books were written about how to use it to promote websites and businesses.
For those of us who used it , it was great and a real sense of community developed which you may see in later years.
Check out the StumbleUpon category for more info
LIVE 8
http://www.live8live.com/
Live 8, 2 July 2005
When I saw the Boomtown Rats playing at the Apollo Theatre, Oxford back in 1979 I never in my wildest dreams thought Bob Geldorf would end up being knighted and using music as a force for good.
It’s very easy to knock ‘worthy causes’ but if millions (billions?) of people can make enough noise to send a message that extreme poverty can be iradicated and should be iradicated. Then I for one am all for it.
As ‘Sir’ Bob said “It’s not about politics it’s about morality.”
Update 2022:
Good intentions – didn’t make any real difference though – but the music was great.
Tony Blair MP – anagrams
http://www.anagramgenius.com/archive/tonybl4.html
Anagrams of Tony Blair MP:
I’m Tory Plan B. (Well we all knew that!)
Try a limp nob. (Must be the third way that he’s always going on about.)
Anagrams of ‘Tony Blair’:
A Lib ‘n’ Tory.
I rat nobly.
Not by Rail?! (The UK has the most expensive and unpunctual trains in the EU)
Anagram of ‘Tony Blair’s “New Labour”‘:
Wobble, tyrannous liar! – (Where ARE those WMDs Mr Blair?)
My favourite:
“Tony Blair’s election manifesto” = “More nasty lies. Notable fiction.”
Box Set: Ewan McGregor: Long Way Round (Two Disc Set)
http://www.box-set.co.uk/Ewan-McGregor-Long-Way-Round-6B3UE6.html
I’ve recently finished reading The Long Way Round: Chasing Shadows Across the World by Ewan McGregor & Charley Boorman, about their epic motorbike ride from London to New York via Magadan in Eastern Russia. and empathised with this sentiment:
“I thought back to the day a month or so earlier when we had been in Mongolia. It was mid-afternoon and we were riding through a beautiful valley. I pulled over and got off my bike. Charley, ahead of me, stopped too. He swung his bike around and rode back towards me. Before he even arrived, I could feel it coming off him: why are we stopping? We’re not getting petrol, we’re not stopping to eat: why are we stopping?
I walked away from Charley, I didn’t want to tell him that I had stopped because we’d passed the place. The place we’d fantasised about months before we’d even set off from London. A place with a river of cool, white water and a field nearby to pitch our tents. The place we were going to stop at in the middle of an afternoon so that we could cool our sweaty feet in the river while catching fish that we’d cook that evening on an open fire under a star-speckled sky.
I’d seen that river half an hour earlier. There was no question at all that it was the place. A beautiful big white river and nobody for hundreds of miles. And we had ridden straight past it.”
Click the link below for a bigger picture of a Mongolian river much like the one Ewan McGregor must have seen.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050109133932/http://www.jts88.com/mongolia/Photos/largeimages/river.jpg
Update 2022:
…having been to Mongolia I can confirm that it is has spectacular landscapes
Silver Machine Sheet Music
http://www.starfarer.net/smsheet.html
Silver Machine by Hawkwind, probably the only song of theirs available with sheet music?
The whole song can be downloaded here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060502234544/http://www.starfarer.net/smsheet.html
This week I is mostly listening to…
Hawkwind
I
I just took a ride
in a silver machine
And I’m still feeling mean.
Do you wanna ride see yourself going by.
The other side of the sky
I got a silver machine.
It flies side ways thru’ time
It’s an electricline
It’s your Zodiac sign.
I’ve got a silver machine
I’ve got a silver machine.
I said
I just took a ride in a silver machine
And I’m still feeling mean.
It flies
out of a dream
It’s antisceptically clean
It turns everything green.
Do you wanna ride see yourself going by.
The other side of the sky
I mean a silver machine.
I’ve got a silver machine
Nobody writes better doggerel than Hawkwind!
Official hawkwind site: here
b3ta.com challenge: new toys in breakfast cereals
http://b3ta.com/challenge/breakfast/page6.htm
Yet another b3ta.com challenge, this time it’s new toys in breakfast cereals
Hmmmmmm, collapsing waveforms…….
Update: 2022
not all the pictures are still online – there were some great ones too – ah well
Skedaddles reviews – StumbleUpon
Skedaddle was another StumbleUpon user and blogger with a American Civil War theme.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050404001720/http://skedaddle.stumbleupon.com/
As one ‘Civil War’ aficionado to another I cannot rate Skedaddle’s site highly enough, whilst I merely read around the English Civil War Skedaddle contributes to the body of knowledge about the American Civil War. Visit his site at: http://www.pddoc.com/skedaddle/articles/index.html to find out more.
Update 2022:
Skeddale’s website is still online but sadly doesn’t seem to have been updated for a long time.
Console Development – What we have done
Tianjin 天津市
http://www.kakura.jp/hw/wallpaper/2003/00306_2003-02-12_tianjin_800x600.jpg
Photos of Tianjin, 天津市
Update2021 – all these originals dropped off the web so I thought I’d upload some of my own to replace them.
See here for some of my flickr pics and here for general China pics.
Papers, Please! The Identity Project
Update 2021 : failed in both countries thank goodness, but the Papers, Please! The Identity Project website is still going which is good as these issues remain relevant.
“There are good people with bad papers; and bad people with good papers.”
– Bertolt Brecht
I’m horrified that the USA could be getting compulsory ID cards too. The perpetrators of 9/11 all had valid ID’s .
When I was younger I used to travel to Europe and I hated the way the gendarmes would demand ‘Papiers, papiers!’ to intimidate and hassle foreigners. In a manner only one step removed from the Geheime Staatspolizei.
It’s incredible that the present US Administration wants to make the USA resemble France.
Incidentally, these old stumbleupon pages are often in the interesting links category which you may like to check out
From the site:
What’s Wrong With Showing ID?
What does an ID, any ID, do for security? The honest answer is ‘not much’. If anything, relying on ID for security purposes actually makes things worse: a false sense of security fosters complacency.
Showing ID only affects honest people. If you’re dishonest, you can obtain false documents or steal the identity of an honest person.
If a 19 year-old college student can get a fake ID to drink, why couldn’t a bad person get one, too? And no matter how sophisticated the security embedded into the ID, wouldn’t a well-financed terrorist be able to falsify that, too? The answer to both questions is obviously ‘yes’.
Dalek – some empathy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalek
Like the Daleks I sometimes just want to ‘Exterminate!’
Fractal Dome Virtual Exhibition Hal
http://www.fractal-dome.de/e3dg5.shtml
https://web.archive.org/web/20050407140746/http://www.fractal-dome.de/eindex.shtml
Updated 2021
From the site:
| Making of |
| The Fractal-Dome logo was created with a special ray-tracing program. The logo contains two times almost the same part of the mandelbrot set: the graphic on the plane and the massive parts of the dome. |
Mass Destruction – Faithless
http://faithless.jopinion.nl/images/OOR/002a.jpg
This week I is mostly listening to…
Mass Destruction – Faithless
Whether long range weapon or suicide bomber
Wicked mind is a weapon of mass destruction
Whether you’re soar away sun or BBC 1
Misinformation is a weapon of mass destruction
You could a Caucasian or a poor Asian
Racism is a weapon of mass destruction
Whether inflation or globalisation
Fear is a weapon of mass destruction
FreqWizs reviews – StumbleUpon
http://freqwiz.stumbleupon.com/
Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20051104043017/http://freqwiz.stumbleupon.com/
“…even though what you might say about my country, my president, my job, or me might hurt, I will gladly die defending your right to say it!” This is a sentiment I can agree with, however, I will respectfully remind you of what your general George S Patton said “Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
‘Gorgeous’ George Galloway
http://www.680news.com/news/international/article.jsp?content=w051785A
Update: Link expired so here’s the actual footage:
‘Gorgeous’ George Galloway is a man with whom I do not see eye to eye. He is basically a communist, and I do not like communism.
However, I do respect him personally. He defeated the Daily Telegraph in a libel case, defeated Tony Blair by overturning a huge Labour majority and convinced the voters of Bethnal Green that he should represent them in Parliament.
So he went to the US Senate and turned the tables on his accusers. They had, he said, committed a ‘schoolboy error’ in stating that he had personally received money out of the Iraqi ‘oil for food programme’. I watched him live on BBC TV yesterday for a full 20 minutes. It was a barnstorming performance and despite what you may hear from other media sources he wiped the floor with Senator Coleman who looked stunned and could only think of a rebuttal after he had had time to consider it.
George, I REALLY disagree with your views on most things but like your party’s name you have my respect.
Daleks are not for kids?
http://www.megastar.co.uk/world/news/2005/05/16/sMEG01MTExNjI0MDM3MjI.html
‘Exterminate! Oh why do I bother?’
The nanny state is wagging its finger again – this time wrapping the nippers in cotton wool over Dr Who and the Daleks.
An episode from the current, excellent series of the Time Lord caper – called ‘Dalek’, confusingly – had scenes where Dr Who’s pepper-pot shaped sworn enemy was shown being tortured.
The ‘torture’ scene has proven enough to see the great and good at the British Board of Film Classification refuse to give the new DVD release of the hit BBC drama a PG certificate.
So Daleks are not for kids then – got it.
Phreaks favorite websites – StumbleUpon
http://phreak.stumbleupon.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20050404174746/http://phreak.stumbleupon.com/
Phreaks reviewed sites made me laugh outloud – thumbs up!
Indian Railways and London Underground signs
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/images/indian_rail15_gal.jpg
From the site:
“THE ROUNDEL, or the diamond-shaped signs at railway stations mentioning its name, may seem like a humble identity marker for railway stations, but it has over the years seen changes, from its design, the number of languages in which it identifies stations to the recent changes to its shape. At its core, however, the roundel, like several other railway features, owes its design to the British, who laid the foundation of the present-day local railway lines.
Talking about the history of the roundel in his book, Halt Station India, railway historian Rajendra Aklekar says the signage, also termed “bulls eye”, has its origins in London. He says in 1908, the Underground Electric Railways Company of London used a winged, spoked wheel for its stations’ name boards and “fashioned a bright red circle with a blue bar across”.
BBC Monsoon Railway
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/monsoon-railway.shtml
Update: – No longer on iPlayer , but it is on Youtube (resolution 480 so just about watchable)
Information is still present on the BBC website though
Fascinating BBC television documentary about the Indian Railways which brought back memories of my trek across India and Nepal many years ago.