That's How It Happened

I'm in Glasgow today for a work related conference. I'm posting from within the shell of the Glasgow Science Centre. Constrained to use IE5.1 for Mac, I shan't attempt any fancy linking. Instead a few brief, and possibly racist observations about Glasgow:

The IMAX theatre (pictured) looks exactly like the brainbug from Starship Troopers.

The people here have terrible hair colour, as if colourists are afraid to cross the border, and instead everyone relies on bottles of Wella.

No-one seems to have an iPod. On the Underground in London almost 1/4 of all rush hour travellers sport white headphones. Here I've seen none.

I got my first ever visitor from Krygystan today. You'd think they'd have other things to be worrying about. Somehow it's reassuring to think that the anxieties engendered by civil unrest and political turmoil are being salved by internet frippery.

Coca-Cola Co want the grey market in sweet sweet Mexican Coke stopped, but luckily Dr Soda is fighting the ban with online ordering. Meanwhile PepsiCo get the wrong end of the stick trying to introduce repulsive Mirinda to the States.

No sooner than I predicted the launch of a PSP web browser than it exists. A wondrous hack!

Derren Brown is a creepy fraudulent sack 'o' shit, and I'm betting the "highly suggestible" people who appear on his show, far from being under the influence of "mind control", are under the influence of cash from an extras agency. Simon Singh has other problems with this charlatan.

Butter Couple is like Hot Or Not vs Friendster.

How is it that sometimes the most environmentally unfriendly nonsense is able to dress itself up as healthy? Dolphin 2 makes "pure" water from air, in a brilliant use of fossil fuels. I'm hoping someone catches Legionnaire's from this thing and sues them out of existence.

Solving Cryptic Crosswords
Last autumn I declared that solving an entire cryptic crossword, was one of my new life goals. I'd read Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose, a crossword memoir, in which the author Sandy Balfour admits that it took him 7 years of struggling to complete an entire crossword. It took me three months to polish off my first one unaided. I managed two Guardian crosswords in consecutive days last week, so feeling confident, I thought I'd share my tips for becoming a solver.

1. Reconnaissance There are several guides to the 8 types of cryptic clue, and it helps to understand what you're up against. The important thing to know though, is that the answer is always a synonym of the first or last word (or phrase) in the clue. The rest of the clue aims to superficially distract you from the true meaning, and yet simultaneously also "clues" the answer.

2. Be Prolific To get good, you need to solve lots of clues. There's an enormous hidden vocabulary to clue solving (e.g. Sailor=Tar, Worker=Ant, Flower=River), and you can only pick these all up by solving. There are two ways of going about this. Firstly pick an easy crossword to begin, such as Everyman in The Observer, or even The Sun crossword which has non-cryptic clues to accompany it. Secondly, initially you shouldn't be ashamed to cheat. I'd recommend this crossword solver, for when you can't make headway for a puzzle, or when you don't have patience to struggle with a long anagram.

3. A Dictionary Is Not Cheating In particular the Saturday prize crosswords are designed to be solved with a dictionary in hand. Every crossword has an associated recommended dictionary, and sometimes you might need to pour through it for inspiration with a tough clue, or a very obscure answer. The Wikipedia probably does count as cheating, but it's brilliantly helpful when you are struggling to find the name of a baroque composer, or can't remember all the novels of Edith Wharton.

4. Consistency Counts Each broadsheet has it's own style, and it gets easier as you learn the style. Just as it's hard to be good at tennis and squash, it's tough to change between The Times and The Guardian. Equally when a crossword tells you who it's by, as The Guardian does, you quickly learn what sort of oddities and pecadillos to expect from each setter.

I don't think this website has ever acheived anything of note, except pointing people in the direction of a foolish pair of sneakers or a facile flash game. If you felt inspired by this to tackle a crossword or two, I'd be really proud, so do tell me via the comments.

Handy PSP Links
I've played my PSP solidly for a week, and I'm utterly impressed. It looks sexier than any gadget ever, and the games I've played (Ridge Racers and Tony Hawk) are essentially perfect PS2 ports. I did have a couple of small gripes, but it seems they've all been fixed:

The PSP only takes new Memory Stick Duos, but if you're determinedly cheap there's a convertor kit, to let you use old style Memory Sticks.

The video encoding is a nightmare, particularly on the Mac. However I have found these torrents of preconverted movies, and these these two bits of great software, that make it easy.

Most games are enabled for "Ad-Hoc" local wireless network play, but not "Infrastructure" internet play, luckily Kai X-link lets you play any game globally. Awesome.

The standby function is great, but there is a slight delay as you "un-standby", however there's now new Japanese firmware that fixes that.

Overall I'm just absolutely enamoured. The only thing lacking at present is a web-browser. I'm guessing it can't be long till some homebrew genius releases one though.

Cut out and keep this functional yet diminutive trebuchet.

Snake-bot is cooler than the coolest robot ever, and more threatening.

Gravy Train are "a bubblegum/pop/new wave/punk/chipmunk group-slash- dance troupe" with brill videos.

My Favourite joke.
There are two Mexicans who have been lost in the desert for weeks, and they're at death's door. As they stumble on, hoping for salvation in the form of an oasis or something similar, they suddenly spy, through the heat haze, a tree off in the distance. 
As they get closer they can see that the tree is draped with rasher upon rasher of bacon. There's smoked bacon, crispy bacon, life-giving juicy nearly-raw bacon, all sorts. 
"Hey, Pepe" says the first bloke, "Ees a bacon tree!!! We're saved!!!" 
"You're right, amigo!" says Pepe. 
So Pepe goes on ahead and runs up to the tree salivating at the prospect of food. But as he gets to within five feet of the tree, there's the sound of machine gun fire, and he is shot down in a hail of bullets. 
His friend quickly drops down on the sand and calls across to the dying Pepe.
"Pepe!! Pepe!! Que pasa hombre?" 
With his dying breath Pepe calls out...."Ugh, run, amigo, run!! Ees not 
a Bacon Tree!"
"Ees... a.... Ham bush"

My Second Favourite Joke
What would you rather bee or a wasp?

From the pages of the excellent no.Where:

Blink-o-rama, a blog entirely composed of photos of celebrity blinkers.

GTA San Andreas Polaroid Photo Journal (joke undoubtedly lost on non-GTA fans).

Tab Device, a Hiroshi Fujiwara designed Levi/Porter concept store, with an awesome flash interface.

The definitive BdJ Theory? My theory is that it sucks, and we should all forget about it and move on.

Needies.com, like rain on a sunshiny day.

How to order off-menu at In 'N' Out. This is a persistent unfulfilled fantasy of mine.

Surviving the zombie apocalypse.

I'm drunk and I'm angry.
Drunken blogging is such a nicht nicht, but tonight I'm incensed. Tonight a certain pub-quiz team-mate made a unilateral decision to wrongly overule me. The question in question was: "In which 70's TV show did Mr Roarke, played by Ricardo Montalban, grant visitors any wish they desired?". The correct answer, which I supplied was naturally, Fantasy Island. I perhaps had discredited myself by single handedly attempting to drink my way through last week's prize of £40 of beer, but I didn't deserve unfounded over-ruling. The theme for the round was "lyrics to "Bohemian Rhapsody"", of which the second line was "Is this just fantasy...", but somehow that line was forgotten in the melee of the Florence quiz. Instead, infidels and scoundrels undermined my self-imagined status as quiz-captain extraordinaire, by incorrectly secretly jotting down "One Wish" as the supposed answer, Friendships have been destroyed for lesser reasons. As it was, we won "a bottle of house wine", instead of the more prestigious, but less welcome, "dinner for two". I'm holding this grudge until further notice.

More stuff on the ol' interweb:

Sealice=evil, box jellyfish=frickin satanic

Google X, for moments when you're too drunk to remember all the neato crap google does these days.

Everything has motion sensors: Game Boy Color, PC Joypad, Powerbook.

A joke I don't get: rufus.ishavingamassage.com. I feel excluded by the nerd crowd.

SBTG gets his incredible customised Nikes into the NYT. Did somebody say "mainstream sell-out biznitches"?

A guide to ethnic fried doughs around the world.

When I get married I want a giant three tiered pork pie, for a wedding cake.

The Actroid Reception Robot is the creepiest proto-humanoid since Realdoll (NSFW)

Everything looks better in Slooowwww Moootttiiioooon.

The GF conspired with the incredibly nice people at nixta.com, amoral.org, and coolnina97.com to bring me the best birthday present imaginable. A real live PSP all the way from Tokyo. My first impressions are that it looks amazing, the graphics quality is astounding, Ridge Racer plays like a dream, and my thumbs really already hurt a whole lot.

Me and Lindsay
I've previously complained about people borrowing images directly off my server to use as avatars on message boards. Bandwidth is practically free, but not so free that I want to give it away.
Now though I face a new problem. Search for "lindsay lohan" on Altavista image search, and the picture shown, as hosted on my server, is the number one result. I wouldn't fuss about it excessively, but the thousands of hits do mess up my webstats. I like people to visit here for the fine original content, the esoteric links, and what passes for intelligent lively debate in the comments. I'm not so keen on them dropping by merely to ogle teen breasts.
I could just change the name of the file on my server and forget about it, but I thought it might be funnier to hold a little competition.
Phase 1: Based on reader suggestions, substitute something suitably obscene/vile/hilarious for the Lohan picture.
Phase 2: Award a small prize for the best screen shot demonstrating said image in incongruous placement on the web.
Phase 1 starts as of now. Please suggest pictures via the comments, and I shall make the substitution at midnight on Monday. I imagine that will leave approximately 48 hours for Phase 2, before the Google and Altavista bots realise their mistake.

If you are determinedly here for Lohan content, then I recommend pagesixsixsix.com, where blogger Perez Hilton gives great gossip on his beloved "Hohan".

Cowbell Tiara is like, the most Japanese thing on earth. Nice pictures though.

Mobile phone shaped tombstone, the ultimate (Israeli) chav status symbol.

Once upon I time, I thought "retro" was a grave insult, now I'm actually linking to a flash version of Kaboom!

Spoke mounted double sided air writing device. Best bicycle hack ever? It's wheelie wheelie good.

For reasons that are strangely both lascivious and prosaic, this site is currently getting over one thousand hits a day. I thought it might be worth promoting something that counts, rather than the usual trivialities. Tonight I hit the private view for Annie Morris' new show at the Laura Bartlett Gallery in Bermondsey. She's a friend, and I'm clearly biased so I won't eulogise excessively. However she paints fantastic female nudes, in a variety of media, including her peg pictures as shown. The show runs until April 23rd and has my absolute recommendation. The private view was suitably celeb studded, and ordinarily it would be gauche to name-drop. However I did make one notable famous acquaintance: Lucy Liu. After extremely mixed previous celeb encounters, I was ultra-wary of schmoozing Ms Liu. However to my delight, upon being introduced (not at my insistence), she said I was "dressed extremely dashingly", and proceeded to take my photo, not once but twice. Consider me star-struck.

While I was in South Africa at Christmas everything I own got stolen. I was out partying with my brother one night, and thieves broke into my bedroom and walked off with everything I had in South Africa. All my summer clothes, my camera, iPod, watch, bedclothes, toothbrush etc etc. I spent the rest of the holiday wearing either the same clothes I had on that night, or my wetsuit. I took it all pretty philosophically, and my peace of mind was helped by being insured. I haven't actually placed the claim yet (just three months later), but I am starting to think about replacing stuff. I've been mooning over iPod Photos in the Apple Store, but then I saw this: PSPWare. It's a $10 piece of OSX software that turns your PSP into a kick-ass iPod Photo. Since the PSP is only £179 at present, and I already have a stack of MemorySticks kicking around, that seems like a sweet option. I'm so impressed in fact that I rushed out and invested all my virtual stock in PSP at the Yahoo Research Labs Tech Buzz Game. If I make my virtual fortune, I plan to retire from medicine and become a pro-extreme downhill ice skater.

Theme of the day is animals.

Word of the day is: corvine.

Crazy way to augment Firefox of the day is: mouse gestures.

Game of the day is: Fowl Words. (A chicken version of Boggle).

Photoshop contest of the day is: helper animals.

Scary animal of the day is (today and always): Great White Shark.

Things worth paying for online.
Ever since the early days of the web, everything online has always seemed to be free. Not DVDs from Amazon, or "eBay goods" obviously. I mean actual web services and online content, which tend by default to be provided free. I've had a really really hard think about things I pay for online, and can't come up with anything significant. I did once pay $5 for a username at metafilter, and I'm pretty sure I registered my copy of iPoker, but that's it. Not a single recurring subscription, aside from domain name and hosting for this site. So my question of the day for helpful readers is: "What online content or service do you actually feel is worth paying for?". If everyone suggests farmyardslutz.com, I'll be a little disappointed in you.

Super Shuffle, the iPod Shuffle clone that's cheaper, with better sound quality, and more features.

Play, a sweet bit of Flash animation.

The Big He-bowski, a He-Man vs Big Lebowski mash-up.

Ugly shoe gets beautiful ad directed by Spike Jonze.

pya.cc is a crazy asian repository of strange photos. This photo looks like it shows a North Korean fairground accident in progress. Either that or schoolkids in the East can jump real high.

Will Smith is Straight to Video, and other funny graffiti at picturesonwalls.com. It's like Adbusters without the anti-corporate posturing.

Vaguely aware that Desperate Housewives is the new SatC, I keep watching, wondering if Teri Hatcher might get naked. As a service to all boys, tormented by this tedious show, (and not for the titillation value) here are the horrific topless Hatcher pictures you'll wish you'd never seen. (NSFW)

Tomoko Takahashi at the Serpentine, is worth checking out. The whole gallery looks like an explosion in a toy cupboard, or a scene from Katamari Damacy. Dope.

When was it that Spike Lee sold out so completely? He presents the fiendish Air Jordan 20 game at nike.com.

Awesome results of a contest to design chairs from champagne corks and bottles.

Many thanks to everyone who made this the most visted week ever in the history of howithappened.com. Uber-exciting.

The Borders DVD Lock Mystery

A friend inadvertently took a copy of "Eternal Sunshine..." from Borders this week, that still had the anti-theft device inserted. The system is designed to prevent shoplifters leaving the store with either the DVD case, or the disc alone.
It consists of a little plastic shiv, that inserts through a specially designed case, and locks under the disc itself. When it's in place you can't open the case, and even if you could open the case, you can't pop the disc off its mount.
Instead of having a deactivateable magnetic strip, it has a small permanent magnet at one end. This presumably triggers the alarms if you try to walk out of the store.
I figured it would be only a few seconds work to crack open the case, and then "reverse engineer" the real unlocking mechanism.
It took me half an hour of wheedling and poking with various implements to realise that it's a pretty secure system. It was however only 10 seconds work with a Stanley Knife (read "X-acto" US visitors) to dissect the case itself. Once open, it just needed brute force to break the hook off the shiv, then slide out the locking bar.
This is where the mystery begins. There don't seem to be any secret holes, magic buttons, or even any moving parts. The locking mechanism is a very solid little metal clip, that gets utterly wedged inside the case when you insert the device. I have to admit defeat. Please please if anyone knows how this little b*stard works, email me. I promise I won't use the knowledge to steal movies (when I want to do that I just use bitorrent), but I'll feel less stupid.

Living in London is becoming so expensive. (Via the ever reliable mk)

It seems I didn't exactly read the small print when signing up for rinkya.com (see below). The minimum fee for an auction win seems to be $35, which is a bit of a dampener on actual bargain hunting. However they do give me $10 each time one of you lot sign up and mention this site, so that offsets the commission. Get signing.

The CCL Game, a little gem of fans and springs and conveyor belts.

I've realised just two weeks after the event, that I was too drunk to take any photos on my birthday. If you were there, and managed to stay sober enough to snap straight, email me so I can add them to a collective Flickr Pool. The photo here shows me dressed as one of the Crazy 88 (complete with samurai blade from swords.org.uk), being presented with a giant Krispy Kreme Kake, by the GF, dressed as a Donut Geisha.

Bankruptcy beckons.
Rinkya.com is one of those sites that make you say you "wished you'd thought of that". It makes it possible for non-japanese speaking gaijin to bid on japanese auctions. You register, then peruse auctions.yahoo.co.jp at your leisure, but with handy overlaid translations of auction descriptions. Then you bid, in yen, via your Rinkya account, and if you win, you get the item shipped to you via the Rinkya warehouse in Japan. They take their cut from a 25% premium on shipping costs. The whole site would benefit from a redesign to simplify navigation, but the idea itself is genius. If you have an unsated passion for bearbricks, tentacle pr0n, or just maybe Nike Air Wovens, then rinkya.com might prove an expensive distraction.

Redonkulous is so over, redonkolous is where it's at. (Spotted at better than yours)

Please can someone explain to me how to google for "Bank$y" because I saw a dope Bank$y T-shirt at bAsTaRd on Thursday, and my google skillz is too weak. (Incidentally bAsTaRd, ever a sausage-fest, turned crazy this week as the assembled crowd donned hats made from hardcore gay pr0n; maybe too crazy for repressed old me.)

Hopalong Harrison, the space hoppa that's also a grotesque phallus (SFW).

The backlash against pointless word by word linking has begun over at J-Walk.

Paris Made Me Change My Number, is THE t-shirt of last week.

More lavatory photography, this time of aircraft toilets.

Land cruiser/tank on amazon, that looks exactly like Jabba's Sail Barge, only a bit smaller.

Nike Air Woven Colorways
1st Edition:
001 ANTHRACITE/NEUTRAL GRAY-SPICE
041 NEUTRAL GREY/DK GRAPE-LT STRAW
121 LT STRAW/PRALINE-PONY
2nd Edition
311 YAKI KHAKI/LIGHT STRAW-PONY
061 BLACK/CHILI RED
3rd (Hiroshi Fujiwara Tokyo) Edition:
011 DARK CHARCOAL/IVORY
031 SOFT GRAY/BRIGHT TEAL
042 DARK CHARCOAL/GAME BLUE
071 LIGHT BONE/LIGHTENING
131 IVORY/ARMY OLIVE
301 MOSS GREEN/DARK CHARCOAL
411 REGATTA/IVORY
641 SAMBA/GAME BLUE
032 NY x HEADPORTER BLACK/GRASS GREEN
231 DK MOCHA/YAKI KHAKI
4th Edition:
081 DK CHAR/BR MANDARIN-C GREY
271 BRITISH KHAKI/CASHMERE-LINEN
331 CARGO/CARGO-GRAVEL
5th Edition:
481 GLACIER BLUE/AGENT
021 BLACK/DK MOCHA
003 MIDNIGHT FOG/MED CHARCOAL-BARN
004 BLACK/MET SILVER/MET GRAPHITE
412 CITY NAVY/WHITE
141 IVORY/CITY NAVY
312 CLASSIC OLIVE/NET-CHILE RED
221 OLIVE BRNZE/CANE-PEAR-CL OLIVE
281 NUTMEG/SPICE-DK ORANGE-CANE
441 MARINA/CLRWTR-AQUAMRN-MDTN BL
002 MIDNIGHT FOG/MED CHAR-OXYGEN
062 LIGHT BONE/RED MAHOGANY
World Cup Edition:
082 NIGHT MOSS/LIGHTENING
132 WHITE/APPLE GREEN-LIGHTENING
741 LIGHTENING/LAPIS-GREEN APPLE
6th Edition:
621 JULEP/MYSTIC TEAL-BLACK MOSS
011 BLACK/WHITE-BLACK
SL Edition:
271 KHAKI/MED CURRY-CINDER
661 MYTH/MYTH/LT BONE/ABYSS
hTM Edition:
001 BLK/GRAPH-MED GREY-M SILVER
911 RAINBOW/WHITE-LINEN
271 DARK MOCHA/MEDIUM CURRY-BEACH
221 IRON/BUFF-CHINO
251 KHAKI/QUASAR PRPLE-RAINBOW
261 KHAKI/VARS RED-RAINBOW
211 KHAKI/NET-LT STONE

Very observant readers will note that this post looks a little familiar. I am still on a quest to acquire every colorway of the Nike Air Woven. I am being foxed by the extreme scarcity of the colorways originally only released in Tokyo. Yahoo.co.jp auctions is quite impossibly impenetrable, but holds the key to completion. For the record I am missing 15 pairs (041, 011, 031, 042, 071, 131, 301, 411, 641, 004, 312, 062, 082, 132, 621). I know that Sample Kickz, and B23B, have most of these pairs available, but their prices are outrageous. Any help (in the form of low offers for missing pairs, japanese translation services, moral support) gratefully accepted. Just drop me an email.

John C Reilly Makes Us All Smiley

The very ironically named "Brightcoop" E-Z Chicken Harvester. (Warning contains scenes that will shock vegetarians.)

I had such good intentions for my reading this weekend. I'd been recommended Spring Snow, the first part of a classic turn-of-the-century japanese epic called The Sea of Fertility. The author, Mishima grew up in a samurai household, and committed seppuku on the day he completed this masterwork. I picked up a copy, eager for hours of self-improving meditation. Instead of enjoying its bleak landscapes and samurai ethics, I got distracted by Belle De Jour: Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, the book of the more famous blog.
The book gives no clue as to who wrote it, and apart from the title makes no other claims to be a work of fiction. But really it is a transparent fraud. The blog recently helpfully points out: "I haven't even been invited to my own launch party." I wonder why that might be?
It all reads like the letters page from Penthouse. Entry after entry describing entry after entry:

"I could feel the swollen head of his &%£@ clearly through the narrow wall of tissue separating the two orifices, and wiggled the tips of my fingers to tickle his ?*@%&."

As a work of pornography, it certainly delivers. Every sexual subculture seems to get a look in, and every other day describes a new encounter. About a quarter of the entries are lifted straight from the blog, and the rest are fabricated around it.
I probably shouldn't be disappointed that this is clearly neither a real diary, nor does it seem to be written by a woman. However I am annoyed that it doesn't have any kind of narrative or even a strong theme. Obviously a strong narrative arc would make it seem even less plausible as a real memoir, but it is extremely dull in its vacuity. Even the Guardian who initially championed Belle, gave the book a terrible panning. Save your pennies and enjoy the Belle de Jour Digested Read, or just wait for planned Channel 4 series.
If you feel like reading something insightful about meaningless sex, I'd suggest The Sexual Life of Catharine M. It's evidently all true, all filthy, all startlingly honest, and she also has her own website.

Life imitates art, in a prosaic Heat Magazine-ish way.
In last night's episode of Nathan Barley, hero Dan Ashcroft passes out in a pile of paint cans, and wakes up with paint in his hair. When pressed by the idiot savant Nathan, he pretends the style is called "Geek Pie", and through Nathan's foolish copying, inadvertently spawns a Tokyo fashion trend.
Having crawled out of bed to visit my optician this morning I saw Julian Barratt (who plays Dan Ashcroft) on Upper St. He didn't actually have paint in his hair, but he did look mightily hung over and dishevelled. My eyes did have some residual fluorescein staining, but truly he looked like a wreck.
Perhaps Barratt had been drinking away his sorrows. Unfortunately for Chris Morris, and all else involved, Nathan Barley appears to be bombing. Last Friday was (according to Media Guardian) Channel 4's "second worst Friday evening in over a decade". I quite like the show, it's just not as cringingly funny, or as clever as Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Turns out McNugget Numbers are way cooler than Mersenne Primes anyway.

Electroplankton is the only game that's got me even halfway excited about the Nintendo DS. (I tried the DS in Tokyo, and it sucked compared to the PSP.)

I really love my new Nike Considered Boots. They look like Visvims crossed with Air Wovens, and they come with a free eco-shoulder bag. (Huge thank you to Nixta, who queued up in the snow at the NYC launch for me.)

GIMPS
On Wednesday Dr Martin Novak, a german opthalmogist was catapulted from obscurity to worldwide fame when he discovered the world's largest prime number. (25Mb .torrent of said prime here for uber-nerds). His prime number belongs to a special class of primes called Mersenne Primes, after a french monk who "invented" them. Using his home PC, Dr Novak discovered his prime using free software downloaded as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.
Not that I wish to downplay or disparage this worthy pursuit, but I thought of some other names for the project, that they may have rejected before settling for the rather unflattering GIMPS:

World Internet Mersenne Prime Search

Collaborative Hunt for Internet Mersenne Primes

Boring Losers Internet Mersenne Prime Search

If I'd been picking, I surely would have chosen:

Project for Internet Mersenne Prime Investigation and Notification

They really missed an opportunity there. Best suggestion, via the comments, wins a (used) Casio FX-100d Scientific Calculator.

Sneaker Riot! (thanks to Dani Mc for the clipping)

Two Flickr Pools I dig: Stick Figures In Peril and Booty Shotz.

Torture is like so universal: British chav kids get Slap Happy.

I'm too embarassed to post Japanese toilet photos, but this guy has his toilet photos online.

Though I do recommend the Toto Washlet Toilet as featured at the Park Hyatt.

Unless your name is Jordan...
...here's a pleasure you are unlikely to ever share. Freshly delivered off eBay, a pair of Nike Rufus. Great name, ugly shoe, but for £8.50 I couldn't resist. My internet access problems are still trying in the extreme, but here are a few cursory links:

A hippo, dressed as a sumo, dancing to Sisqo. Oh, oh, oh how I laughed. (Thanks to MK)

I made my first post at yesbutnobutyes.com, concerning The Eglu.

The Collected Apologies of Lawrence H. Summers: a McSweeney's list

Filthy finger ass porn but SFW (at least conceptually).

I am in love, with my Xecutor 2.6 X-Box modchip, but I can find no way to network it to my Mac. Any boffinish advice?

If nerdcore rap is your thing, then Optimus Rhyme should hit the spot.

The Life Aquatic, is the best film I've seen this year. Much much more fun than equivocal reviews might have you believe. And it's getting a dope 2-disc Criterion Collection Special Edition DVD on May 10th.

Burgatory a highly politicised, yet terrible flash game.

Cubeoban a completely abstract, uncommercial, un-politicised gem of a game.