That's How It Happened

Never have I enjoyed a flame war so much:
HorseFun.com vs I Hate Horses (via)

rachelle said...
If you think this website is funny, YOU ARE WRONG. this had better be a joke because if it isn't I'm going to contact the authorities and have it shut down.
you have admitted to violence against horses and whether you like them or not, violence against animals is ILLEGAL.
I hope you go to jail for this.
you are sick.

3:20 PM
Dog Food Dale said...
Rachelle, you need to SHUT UP!!! You are clearly a stupid horse lover! Why don't you go roll around in some shit with your horsey friends. Tonight, when I'm beating my horse, I'm going to give her an extra whipping for each retarded comment you make. So keep it up, YOU'RE KILLING THIS HORSE!!!

Harajuku to Islington by sea.
Maybe not everyone is quite so drawn by the consumerist society as me. Ever since I got my first paycheck as a waiter, I've been buying myself undeserved presents over the web. At first it might have been just little treats to brighten a dull winter day. Bit by bit though I've been buying myself bigger and bigger things with more and more disregard for my overdraft.
Eventually I had come to believe that it didn't really matter what I bought, I could never sate that consumerist angst. My DVD collection could never be large enough, I could never have "too many" gadgets, and without doubt Nike's propensity to make new sneakers would always exceed my capacity to buy them.
Today though I've broken through the "glass ceiling" of consumer bliss. My package from Rinkya finally arrived. It's been journeying by sea freight from Honshu over the last two months. It arrived today in a box belonging to the Yamato Transport Company. The box is slightly sodden with what appears to be sea water, and the inside is stuffed with Japanese newspapers. The booty though, is three pairs of DS, Japanese only release Nike Air Wovens.
Never has delayed gratification been so sweet. To celebrate, I created a Harajuku to Islington fly-by using the newly released Google Earth. Viewing the epic journey my precious sneakers have made, has only added to the petit mort .

Words of the day:
Guerdon
Flencing
Anancasm
Those are in approximate order of ascending obscurity. Maximum r-e-s-p-e-c-t for anyone who can actually get 2 or more, out of 3 definitions before following the links.

Cool Nina is doing a project on blogging for her journalism course. She mailed round a little blogging questionnaire, and I though my answers were worth re-circulating. If you'd like to fill out her questionnaire, I'm sure she'd love to hear from you at coolnina97 at yahoo.co.uk.

1. Your name:
Rufus

2. Your blog name:
That's How It Happened / howithappened.com

3. How would you describe your blog:
A vaguely pop-cultural blog that alternates between linkblog and more personal posts.

4. When did you first create it:
October 2003

5. How often do you write on it:
Between once and 5 times almost every day.

6. Why did you create a blog in the first place:
I thought I would be happier writing every day, when I was doing a very uncreative job. I also had a desire to track my websurfing over time, and to keep a very loose diary/photo repository for posterity.

7. What keeps you writing for it:
Vanity, boredom at work, and because I feel less included in the online world without my own website.

8. If you know - how many people read your blog (on average) a day - stats on countries would be useful, but not essential:
Approx 1000 visitors per day (31k this month). Seemingly about 50% are there on purpose, and the rest arriving from random web searches. The majority (54%) are from the USA, with about 20% UK, and the rest spread to ever other conceivable country. (Though no Antarticans yet!)

9. Who do you think your readers mainly are (a description of interests would be fine):
Absolutely diverse. Beekeepers, trainer freaks, nerds, I'm not sure how they differ from other blogosphere types, or from me for that matter.

10. Why do you think they read your blog:
No clue.

11. Do you read any blogs yourself, and if so, which ones:
Mostly this season I will be reading boingboing.net kottke.org waxy.org fimoculous.com catchdubs.com slamxhype.blogspot.com freshnessmag.com beinghunted.com, plus friends blogs. The list evolves all the time.

12. What do you think makes a good/readable blog:
Frequent short posts, so there's always new content. A mix of good links and fresh "primary" content.

13. Which blogs do you think are crap, and if so why:
I hAtE sInGaPOreaN GiRl DiAry BLoGs WhiCH R IllItErAtE.

14. Who'se blog would you most like to read - a kind of wishful thinking question - in terms of if everyone had one etc:
Wes Anderson, Pope Benny, Hiroshi Fujiwara (who has a blog, but only in Japanese)

15. Why do you think blogs originated and have become so prolific:
Because everyone likes to feel a little bit famous.

Old British Impropriety: Trying to commentate on the 1937 fleet review while "tipsy". (Thanks Turlough!)

New British Impropriety: Two chavs humping under a duvet, on live TV, for the edification of the nation.

It is possible that there is no nadir for reality TV? Just an endless downward spiral of drunk idiots frotting and fighting.

Sometimes on a Monday, I don't really have an appetite for so called "brain-work". Sometimes all I really want to do is watch endless movies of base jumping gone wrong. If you feel like indulging in mindless video nonsense, then I suggest finding them via FrenchW. Even when French people are linking to stupid clips of people falling down slides or hilarious police chase movies, they do it in a semi-intellectual way. It makes you feel you might be watching a 21st century version of Claude Lelouche's seminal 1976 roadrace "art movie" C'etait Un Rendez-vous. Now don't you feel better about it? Have you got an appetite for one more basejumping disaster?

Five small cats came out of the mummy cat's tummy.

Congratulations to Mouse (who is a cat) who had five really extra small kittens yesterday, while I sat around and played obstetrician. I may be jaded to the excitements of a labour ward, but cat birthing was new to me. The new kittens really are stupendously small, something akin to scrawny hamsters.

Great big fat white hope

"Help me prepare for the Canton 2006 Bodybuilding Champs". Another strong contender...for best, eBay, auction, ever.

From Der Spiegel in April 05:

SPIEGEL: Do you see it as your job to recruit new followers for Scientology?

CRUISE: I’m a helper. For instance, I myself have helped hundreds of people get off drugs. In Scientology, we have the only successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. It’s called Narconon.

SPIEGEL: That’s not correct. Yours is never mentioned among the recognized detox programs. Independent experts warn against it because it is rooted in pseudo science.

CRUISE: You don’t understand what I am saying. It’s a statistically proven fact that there is only one successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. Period.

SPIEGEL: With all due respect, we doubt that.

The interview might as well have continued like this:

SPIEGEL: What are you doing?

CRUISE: I'm quietly judging you.

Cruise = Frank TJ Mackey.

A mere 136.8 teraflops and it still looks like something from Wargames. Congratulations Blue Gene/L for being the most super of all computers.

I really like A Silent Flute. That is all.

For me, Jonny Glow is a failed product. It's supposed to light your toilet at night via little luminous strips. What would be awesome though, would be glowing toilet bowl water.

Nickleback Vs Nickleback bootleg. The joke being that both tracks are practically identical.

Online poker is so 2004, online Monopoly is where all the hipsters are at.

The Einrad-Fahrzeug is a DIY Segway, only much much more German

City Creator is a neat little game that appears to have stolen its design aesthetic from eBoy.

What IT departments do when they get bored: The Etherkiller.

My new favourite Britney is Britney Gallivan, who holds the world record for folding paper in half.

The Polaroid-o-nizer, for digital photo luddites.

GEL Tv is just 1000% better than anything on UK/US TV. It's Matthew's Best Hit TV X Itchy and Scratchy. Like all things Harajuku it is officially B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

It may only be June, but a Proximity Suit is already on my christmas list.

Is it kind of lame to admit to being attracted to Twi'lek Cosplay girls?

The Katie Holmes / Tom Cruise "16 Days of Scientology Brainwashing" Conspiracy Theory (MSM no less) (via). If you believe it like I believe it you should join the Free Katie Movement.

My Ideal Gadget...almost a reality.
For 94% of my day, I really don't need any gadget support. I'm hardly ever out of reach of a PC/Mac with either wireless broadband, or a healthy wired T1 connection. However when I'm commuting to and from work I'd like a gadget that can: play music, preferably new podcasts; view the entire online Guardian, including the crossword; playback some broadcatched TV shows (I'm thinking maybe Mythbusters, or The Real O.C.); and provide decent web access for email, without horrendous data charges.
Suddenly all this seems like a distinct possibility, via that little gem, the PSP. PSP Homebrew seems to be producing new applications and hacks every day, O2 are finally bringing iMode to the UK, and it's going to work on the underground, and what's more Odeo finally launched, and it makes podcasting worthwhile.
Hooray for all the nerds that have made this possible.

Webby goodness, in a variety of familiar, yet delicious flavours:

Kitty Cannon, a cat abuse flash game. Incidentally my high score of 1292m is unbeatable by humankind, so don't even try.

Learning to love you more which is sort of like Pay It Forward crossed with Flickr, not that that makes any sense.

Mr Pop History a trove of useless trivia, including this list of mafia vocabulary.

The Definitive Shake Soundboard which is absolutely sweet, tripped out, and turbo.

"Do the chickens have large talons?" (wmv). Dominic Errazo, aged just 13, drops a perfect Napoleon Dynamite impression, on live TV, when he's supposed to be concentrating on winning the national spelling bee. All I can say is "Dang".

Infinite Jest - A Book Review of Sorts
I had never heard of Infinite Jest, until I picked it up by chance at the airport on my way to Vietnam. In fact I was only passingly aware of its author David Foster Wallace. However it turns out that it's a former 90's literary sensation. It's renowned for its length (1088 pages in my edition), its slightly nerdy clever-cleverness (over 100 pages of footnotes, some with their own footnotes), and its "anti-confluential" structure, in which the major plot strands and characters (almost) fail to intertwine. I'm not going to ruin it by giving anything more away about the plot. I thought it was the best book I've read in 2 or 3 years. I really enjoyed getting stuck into a book for 9 days on the trot; I wouldn't really recommend you tackle it as occasional bedtime reading. For one thing it's too heavy, even in paperback, to comfortably read in bed. If you know me, and you haven't read it, then I'm probably going to give it to you for christmas; that's how impressed I was. Here are some internet gleanings relating to the book, designed to convey my overawedness.

Listmania Lists featuring Infinite Jest:
Post-Modern, Turn-Your-Brain-To-Juggled-Tatters, Classics
Tough Reading!
I hate trees: great big fat post-WW2 novels
So you'd like to... be a dry pondorous intellectual

Amazon Statistically Improbable Phrases from Infinite Jest:
say her momma, entertainment cartridges, dawn drills, waste displacement, annular fusion, professional conversationalist, feral hamsters, new bong, ceiling bulged, red leather coat, appropriation artist, red beanie, addicted man, littler kids, little rotter, land barge, veiled girl, technical interview, police lock, oral narcotics, milk dispenser, goddamn lie, sober time, his racquet

Other handy links:
Infinite Jest Utilities Page, for accurate footnote navigation.
Infinite Jest Glossary, because DFW is a serious OED man.
Collection of DFW Interviews and Reviews

I'm wallowing in a post-holiday fit of despair. I feel I've squandered my annual leave, and now have no visible vacation on the horizon. In order to counter this extremely negative thinking, I thought I'd recap the:
"Top 10 things I love about Singapore"

1 The cantilevered, glass sided 5th floor pool at the Gallery Hotel.
2 The Night Safari, which is 100% more exciting than a real safari.
3 Limited Edition Vault, with secret super-vault of ultra rare kicks, and where I treated myself to Olympic Pack Dunks.
4 Hainanese Chicken Rice.
5 The Botanic Gardens.
6 The Stamford Swissotel, where the bar is even higher than at the Park Hyatt, and doesn't have a crappy annoying jazz band.
7 Singlish, most irritating creole ever, horh?
8 Changi, so clearly the best airport in the world ever.
9 Far East Plaza, a street-wear paradise to rival Harajuku, featuring Ambush, Leftfoot, and Surrender.
10 Yakitori Robots in the basement of Takashimaya. "I ,for one, welcome our new pork kebab wielding robot overlords."


I'd like to publicly thank Xymon, who sent me off into all the darkest corners of all the most obscure malls, to find all the best sneakers and clothes. He's a veritable one man Superfuture.

"Ghetto wickedness I kick, guess who's back?"-2Pac
I may be back from my travels, but I'm suffering with severe case of cerebral malaria / SARS / Avian Flu / Jetlag. I'm in no fit state for holiday reminiscence yet. It does behove me to thank Yoel for an awesome fortnight of blogging. I thought I'd ease into things with a few odd links, that may or may not be utterly stale, given that 2 weeks is an inordinately long time in the blogosphere:

The Liberty Bill is an alternate design for a dollar bill, with the constitution printed real small, instead of the creepy mono-ocular pyramid thing.

Klein Bottles for real, in like actual glass. With amazing how-to instructions.

Sounds of the World's Animals

UNDFTD are putting excitement back in the sneaker game with their over complicated AJ4 International Raffle and Auction taking place on Thursday.

Custom Creature Taxidermy have some real neat pieces for fans of unorthodox chimerae.

Gray Kangaroo not only filters cheap vodka to make it smooth like Grey Goose, but he has a really really hot non-kangaroo sidekick.

Rather surprisingly, our regular Star Wars correspondant Yoel, has stepped up to the plate as a guest blogger. By day he serves as an expert on Far East politics and financial markets, and by night he moonlights as an expert on Wookies and Britney. I couldn't be more excited to have him on board. I'm off to Vietnam tomorrow, and Yoel's posts are due to kick in on Monday. A final burst of esoteric marginalia before my departure:

Bad Tattoos .com (via this thread about what may be the worst set of tattoos ever, via DJ Catchdubs)

Google Earth looks ridiculously cool.

Photos of an unknown family who probably owned a liquor store.

Suspicious package was fake foot-long plastic penis

A Tale of Two Kims, soon to be guest blogger, Yoel, reviews this year's North Korean must-read.

Unbelievably, I'm actually looking forward to The Dukes of Hazard. Daisy Duke sure do look purty in the trailer.

PDF2PSP makes the PSP an extremely elegant eBook reader.

Could you have won the 2005 US National Spelling Bee?
I thought that Spellbound was a fantastic, captivating documentary. I was only vaguely aware of spelling bees until I saw it. That's mostly because spelling, let alone spelling bees, is not a feature of the UK National Curriculum. Despite that I think my spelling is pretty red hot, though the odd error slips into this blog from time to time. I thought the final 18 words from yesterday's National Spelling Bee final were pretty impressively tough. If you'd like a challenge here is a 15k .amr audio file of me reading out the words. My pronounciations veer from shaky to merely incompetent, but you can download the file and replay it at your leisure. To help you, here are the meanings and linguistic origins in order (that's the same help the National spellers get):

1. A highly polished, convex-cut, unfaceted gem. French
2. A ruffled curtain. Greek.
3. A market condition in which purchasers are so few that the actions of any one of them can materially affect price and the costs that competitors must pay. Greek.
4. An instrument for measuring blood pressure in the arteries, especially one consisting of a pressure gauge and a rubber cuff that wraps around the upper arm and inflates to constrict the arteries. Greek.
5. An aged, dry-cured, spiced Italian ham that is usually sliced thin and served without cooking. Italian.
6. Not in Chambers, Shorter Oxford, or any online dictionary. It is a French Canadian town though. How are you supposed to revise for this crazy test?
7. A French fireman.
8. Cylindrical but usually slightly tapering at both ends, circular in cross section, and smooth-surfaced. Latin.
9. Three spiked. Greek.
10. Any of numerous evergreen shrubs or small trees of the genus xxxxxxxx, having palmately compound leaves and unisexual flowers that are grouped in umbels. It is widely grown indoors as a foliage plant. Also called umbrella tree. Latin.
11. Duckbilled. Greek.
12. The sum payable for the convenience of exchanging money. Latin.
13. A Piedmontese stuffed pasta.
14. A confession of sin. Latin.
15. An instrument for recording thunder and lightning. Latin.
16. The condition that results from excessive loss of water from a living organism. Latin.
17. Belonging to the present day. Latin.
18. An embellishing note, usually one step above or below the note it precedes and indicated by a small note or special sign. Mixed Latin and Greek origin.

This is the actual list of the correct spellings. I hope you'll agree that 13 year old Anurag Kashyap deserves his win. He definitely had me beat.

Coolhunting got an invite to Nike 255. I would be there in a flash if I got the call.

Baiting the Ikea bot: "Does Marcellus Wallace look like a bitch?".

Iran strangely is the pan-asian shark attack leader. (via) Even stranger is that Vietnam has never recorded a shark attack.

Review of McDonald's TV commercials with handy "download 'n' keep" torrent of said commercials. How very modern.

The "10 Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Century" as compiled by "Conservative scholars", which begins to sound like a contradiction in terms.

Very long list of famous people and their recreational drug use.

It's quite hard to shock a gynaecologist, but the McCartney Tube really surprised me. It's a rather specialised surgical instrument, that looks precisely like an obscene sadomasochistic sex toy. It goes exactly where you'd think it ought to, but does something you really couldn't guess at.

Private Eye have recently started webifying part of of their biweekly content. Best of all is the Random Lookalike Archive. They also have a regular feature compiling instances in which Murdoch owned newspapers plug other parts of the Murdoch empire. I heard from an entirely reliable source today that the Times cinema critics are expressly forbidden from panning Fox movies. If I was older and wearier, I'd lament that.

The Hideout Website...
...is one of the worst websites ever created. I love the Hideout store; they stock great exclusive japanese labels, but their website represents everything that is wrong with the commercialisation of the internet. It recapitulates all the faults of failed greedy web enterprises like boo.com. These are my particular complaints:
1. For starters, for completely unfathomable reasons, the entire site lives behind a slow SSL "https" encryption.
2. It has a Flash splash page that can't be skipped.
3. It has uninterpretable URLs, and unhelpful "Continue" buttons, so you can't find your way about.
4. Many of the products featured, are not for sale via the website at all. Perhaps that's not such a crime, but there's no indication of which ones are for sale until you try to buy them.
5. Most importantly, (some might say pompously) of all, though are the insane Terms of Service featuring classic gems such as:

HIDEOUTSTORE.COM and the materials on our site are protected by international copyright laws. No materials or information can be copied, reproduced, modified, distributed, displayed or transmitted, for purposes other than personal use and reference, without our prior written consent.

Whoops, I just transmitted some of their information, for the purposes of ridicule, and I forgot to ask. It gets stupider:

Any links made to HIDEOUTSTORE.COM must be authorised by us. Please make your request to info@hideoutstore.com.

What if I don't care to?

We may include links to other sites from time to time. THE HIDEOUT has no control over the content of these sites and will accept no liability in this respect.

And I think they'll find that I'm not admitting any liability with respect to sites I link to either, including theirs.

Refund requests will be fulfilled with a CREDIT NOTE to your HIDEOUTSTORE.COM account. It can be used for your next order and any unused credit will remain on your account until your next purchase.

It's lucky they just breached my statutory rights, because:

This agreement is governed by the laws of England and by using HIDEOUTSTORE.COM, you agree to submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England.

I suppose I will so long as I'm still in England. But what if I were in Scotland, Wales, Northern Island, or gee-whizz, somewhere outside the UK entirely? They go on:

In order to provide a better service, we would like you to register an account at HIDEOUTSTORE.COM. Your personal information is collected and stored, which will make your shopping experience quicker and more convenient.

Sounds unlikely to me too, but it's OK because:

We hate spam as much as you do.

But not enough apparently, because to avoid getting spam you have to send a written opt-out:

We may also contact you to provide information about THE HIDEOUT or GIMME 5 special events, programs, or store offers that may interest you. If you do not wish to receive such e-mails, please let us know by writing to info@hideoutstore.com.

To finish up, as always, the bizarre catch-all:

Any access or use of HIDEOUTSTORE.COM will signify your consent to our TERMS & POLICIES. We reserve the right to update this section at any time without notice. Please check back regularly to ensure that you are aware of any changes in our practices

I think they'll find I never check back again, and never visit their stupid store either, until they change their horrible ToS. I'm perfectly happy to buy their T-shirts and shoes off eBay and the excellent Rinkya, without being patronised, insulted, and having my rights infringed.

Now who's got the funnest desktop bitch?
I installed OSX Tiger last night on my achingly old slow iMac DV. There were some relatively minor initial gripes. It took about two hours to install, during which time I fell asleep; it then woke me up at 3 a.m. with a blaring "Intro to Tiger" movie. I then discovered that due to various odd conflicts the computer would no longer shutdown. That's now resolved. I've been exploring, and for £89 I seriously wouldn't recommend you bother with the upgrade. The Spotlight search feature does what Google Desktop does, Automator does what AppleScript already did, and Safari now has RSS. Woohoo (sarcasm alert)! However Widgets, (despite being a direct steal from Konfabulator) are kinda fun. As pictured you can see my one-click desktop access to: my address book, the time, a map of the lit portion of the globe, a calculator, misspelled ebay auctions, a hula girl, free web games, a webcam view of Abbey Road, Amazon searching, Wikipedia searching, Dictionary.com searching, online translation services, weather forecasts, a magic 8-ball. Su Doku, a crossword solver, space telescope images, the US National Security threat level, a flower pot that represents my Gmail inbox, and best of all a feed of new widgets for download. So much widgety goodness.