I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew.

600 person-strong Amazon review joke (ok I nicked this off some other blog but don't remember where now)


..ok just realised this might be quite a well-known 'viral' (but how well-known? how would we know? can someone not make an accurate chart of these things?! tracking cookies must be useful for something) there's a milk one too. the magic is now broken slightly. but i think the shirt still stands up on its own.

i think i should get a dog

paragraphs 2 - 4 -- appreciation

- not voodoo

fiction fiction fiction fiction cultural outreach program?

New Yorker Fiction Podcasts

I wanted to title this 'best-kept fiction secret*' with the asterisk conceding that it likely isn't much of a secret to anyone Stateside, or maybe just anyone outside of Jersey CI. But what was drawing me to such an uninspired phrase, a cliché even inaccurate? Hard to say. And I'm gonna blame it on island uninspiration in general. shiiiiit.

But this really is some kind of cross-atlantic -thrown lifebuoy, a voice over the airwaves, a beacon of if not hope then at least some kind of entertainment

Each week some (generally younger) New Yorker-published author chooses, reads and discusses a piece of short fiction from another (generally older) New Yorker-published author. There's Updike, Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borgess, loads of other people I haven't heard of but probably should have...

quite liked Jean Stafford - Children Are Bored on Sundays. 'Invalid Souls'.

I could make more of a list. I haven't listened to them all yet. I can come back.

jus sayin'

i know this looks a bit shit.... i'll get around to it, sometime. any suggestions appreciated.

radio on the tv

(this was in drafts from ages ago, so just thought I'd post it anyway)
not actually related to Tom's coincidentally recent TAL post (yeah i hear google likes superfluous linking)

This American Life TV shows *

I don't feel too guilty about watching this on streaming as it seems near enough impossible to buy on iTunes if you're in the UK. I wasn't sure if I was just being a retard so I've been trying anyways long enough to whet my appetite some - and the one I'd been most particularly looking forward to, just from the summaries, was 'behind the camera'.

instead of making tv in a TAL-style, this literally does just seem 'radio on the TV' - the images don't seem to add that much. I'm not sure what I was expecting. More stunts and explosions?

maybe just a more naturalistic, exposing, documentary-style. something taking more advantage of the visual... we don't need so much dialogue. we can just watch stuff.**


* yeah the sound is out of sync on these but hey, close your eyes and you can pretend it's radio again. or you can pretend that the rules of the universe have both inversed and exaggerated, and sound now travels significantly faster than light. y'know, whichever's easiest.

**to be fair, this might be quite related to the out-of-synch thing.

'scary' brain science

Sometimes I read psych/science stuff and it seems a bit weird or implausible, but I just assume that either I've forgotten to the point of incomprehension most of contents of my degree course already, or the field has really moved on in the last... 9 months.
Whilst the former is likely enough still true, it's at least slightly comforting that the ever-reliable Mind Hacks blog is around to confirm that often the case is just lazy/ill-informed journalism.

Dressing-down of Sunday Times article



(oh.... just realised I left a comment on the article, where I sound like a bit of a twat, and now I'm sharing the article link around..... (realised as in just connected these two things together... ok, well, whatever))

citation jarres

Story: Student (subject and level undefined) inserts fake information into Wikipedia and is thus, by searching on this information, able to see exactly which publications use Wikipedia as a primary, unverified, source.
The execution is commendable: a compelling but fairly plausible, inoffensive, quote inserted into the biography of a relatively low-profile, if obituary-worthy, composer - a prime target for frantic internet searching from same-day deadline journalists.

If the guy who did this (one Shane Fitzgerald) has a blog I can't find it. It would be interesting to see a list of major publictions that used the quote - I kinda feel like blogs don't count, and so far I've found The Guardian (who brought the story to public attention and so covered their backs slightly, and have since changed the original article) and The Independent (who haven't at all covered their tracks).

The guy emailed them all a month later to explain what he'd done, so I'm guessing other publications may have since done an edit. Or they didn't use the quote. Who knows. But this was a pretty good way of trying to find out.