Lost BoyA journal of no fixed aims or direction, by Leigh Dodds

So I read about the Tentacle Man, the Red Man, the Grey Lady and the Purple Man, and tried to find a picture of the much missed Bath Blue Man, but couldn’t find one. Anyone care to share?
His gimmick was to paint himself blue and stand immobile in an alcove next to the Roman Baths waiting for tourists to fling coins in his general direction. I actually preferred to see him idling in-between bouts of standing, still when he’d be enjoying a crafty roll-up. Many pretenders have tried to take his place (and his space come to think of it), but without success.
I did find this Local Heroes in Bath list though, which made me chuckle, especially entries like “Rolf Harris visits a bit”. I’m slightly dubious about the assertion that Michael Jackson lives in Bath though. I may have to trot into town at the weekend to see if I can see Cheggers on the High Street, Lionel Blair in Boots, or maybe Seal in Sainsburys.
I’m doing slightly better than the author who wrote:
“Lived there for 21 years. I’ve never clapped eyes on a celeb. If you’re a tourist p,raps you’re more likely to look”
…as I did once see Anthony Stuart Head on the train. He had a brace of teenager girls travelling with him who I could only assume were “Slayers in Training”.
Come to think of it, if you’re a Bath resident you’re perhaps more likely to spend your time tripping over tourists and forging a path through a sea of backpacks than looking for tourists.
1000 points to the first person to spot Rolf Harris on a bus tour, 500 points for any other celebrity, excluding Peter Gabriel who apparently “has been known to drive through town in his sports car” instead.

Passing on a meme I caught from Norman Walsh. The fifth sentence on page 23 of The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson is:

But while Lord Finkle-McGraw was not the sort to express feelings promiscuously, he gave the impression of being nearly satisfied with the way the conversation was going.

This isn’t the book I’m reading, that’s Foucault’s Pendulum, this was just on my desk in work as I’ve recently lent it to a colleague.

We had a cracking storm this afternoon the sky went dark, thunder, lightning, the full monty. It didn’t last that long, but shortly afterwards I heard some bangs and thuds from outside as it started to hail. Hard.

What you can see here fell in the space of a couple of minutes — the time it took
me to pick up the camera and go to the back door. I didn’t dare venture outside as the hailstones were the size of pennies; literally:

I think I’d have had a very sore head if I’d have gone outside. The noise from the old plastic roofing we’ve got on our out-house was deafening, I thought it was going to come down around my ears.
The storm didn’t last long though, and there were no further incidents throughout the rest of the afternoon. I was just catching up with the news (I’ve had my head in my laptop writing all day) when I learned there was a tornado spotted on the Bristol channel this afternoon. Seems it was seen around 1.30pm. The date on my pictures was 1.53pm, so I’m guessing the dark skies, thunder and lightning must have roughly coincided with the tornado with the hail following shortly thereafter.

Via 2lmc spool: Bob the Angry Flower. Which has been giving me a chuckle or two over lunch today.
It was Bob’s quick guide to the apostrophe that initially caught by attention. I get all irrational when I see Dodd’s (for the record, it should be Dodds’s). And don’t even get me started on “Dobbs”.

Facts:

1. I’ve just bought the new Radiohead album, “Hail to the Thief”
2. I’ve also just bought Bonobo’s new album, “Dial M for Monkey”
3. A Bonobo is also a type of monkey
4. It’s Friday
5. It’s Friday, and there are still no pictures of be-hatted animals on the Daily Chump

Therefore, here’s a picture of a novelty radio in the shape of a monkey with a hat on its head:

Can you see what I did there?
Did I mention I’m on holiday for next week. Going to St. Ives to gorge on pasties.

Just saw this article on “Structured Procrastination” courtesy of Edd on the Daily Chump.
Fits my working style also. This week I’ve refactored the FOAF-a-Matic to allow me to internationalise it very easily, have been hacking on Mark 2 to get ready for another beta, and have been exploring how jpegrdf works with a view to building a tool around it. All while I should actually be concentrating on planning and testing the release of an application.

I added the magic META markup to get myself into GeoURL today and now that they’ve harvested my co-ordinates I’ve been amusing myself by cruising through the list of sites geographically near mine. It makes for interesting reading.
Surprisingly there aren’t any sites at all in Bath. But there are certainly plenty in and around Bristol, of which more than a few seem to be from web designers or web developers. In fact the closest person to me (at least currently) is Simon Willison whose CSS tutorials I bookmarked in my “Stuff To Read” folder earlier this week.
I found cruising through these sites, occasionally tripping over common points of reference (commonly read blogs, thoughts on FOAF and semweb hackery, song lyrics, etc) a fascinating but also very curious experience, highlighting how the web can both draw people together whilst simultaneously pushing them apart; how we have issues and interests in common, but share them within a limited medium; how we can have heated debates and fascinating discussions through and with online personas, without realising that we’re interacting with a person we pass on the street every day.
No new insights. It just got me thinking. Or maybe I’m just in a funny mood because Ethan got me out of bed at 5.50am this morning.
Anyway two of the most interesting things I came across were courtesy of Jon Hadley who linked to these scale drawings of sky scrapers (nice pics) and St. Vincent’s Rock a “story of myths and legends in modern Bristol” (nicely drawn comic).
The latter was part of Bristol’s now failed bid to be Capital of Culture. Shame.

In which a quest to purchase a breadmaker unlocks the secret of the latest digital advances in home technology…

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