Not sure why, but it’s been quite a while since I’ve really liked any website’s design, so well done to these lads for doing the Secret Garden Party site. Can’t decide whether I’d enjoy or be extremely irritated by the air of studied whimsy that the festival seems to be all about, though. There seems to be loads of these festivals popping up and offering to both get you really drunk and whisk you off to some childlike world of carefree innocence and imagination run wild, comfortably surrounded by lots of people eager to help maintain the illusion that what you’re doing is interesting. I can admire the creativity that’s sometimes on display but feel a touch uneasy about the mass embrace of regression to an infantile state under the approving gaze of capitalist enterprise. Or maybe I’m just jealous, I dunno.

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

Now if only he could predict lottery numbers by curling up next to them

Some great stuff in there though:

Nicholas Dodman, who directs an animal behavioral clinic at the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and has read Dosa’s article, said the only way to know is to carefully document how Oscar divides his time between the living and dying.

Yes, Tufts University.

And from elsewhere

Thomas Graves, a feline expert from the University of Illinois, told the BBC: “Cats often can sense when their owners are sick or when another animal is sick.

“They can sense when the weather will change, they’re famous for being sensitive to premonitions of earthquakes.”

Yes, cat expert Thomas Graves, that’s cat expert Tom Graves to his friends.

Good night.

Also, new song here, second item on the blog

This is very nicely done. It derives a ‘walkability’ score for your address based on proximity of shops, services and amenities.

It’s obviously not perfect - it can’t handle Irish addresses (but that’s your own fault for not having a proper addressing system), and it doesn’t adjust for street accessibility or the ‘quality’ of each feature - but still, it’s a good idea and well executed.

And while I don’t think anyone’s going to make a home purchase decision on the basis of minor differences in Walk Scores, the scores for places I’ve lived are roughly about what I’d expect: Lowman Road is certainly closer to the action than Dresden Road. Bill Gates, on the other hand, has clearly blundered big time in choosing such an out of the way spot to live.

I like to think that in thousands of years when archaeologists go digging for artifacts from this era, this video will be all they can find, something which they will report in a scientific paper entitled “OMG, wtf? Lol!!!”

I don’t really mind how this turns out, but it’s fun to watch.

Gabriel Heinze: See you in court, Fergie

Jul 20 2007

by Chris Bascombe, Liverpool Echo

GABRIEL HEINZE will take his battle to join Liverpool from Manchester United to court.

Sir Alex Ferguson stated yesterday there was no way he would sell the 29-year-old to Liverpool.

However, United will have no choice if Heinze has a get-out clause, and now the defender is preparing to begin legal proceedings demanding his sale.

It’s been widely publicised in recent days Heinze has a letter signed by United chief executive David Gill allowing him to join any club which bids £6m – a valuation Liverpool are prepared to meet.

Despite their protests, it’s understood United did not have the foresight to add the phrase ‘except for Liverpool’ in this document.

There’s a wealth of reminiscences from Simpsons insiders in this Vanity Fair piece, but the thing that really struck me (from the first few thousand words, anyway) was this remark by an acquaintance of Matt Groening about the very start of it all, when he had just agreed to start doing one-minute animations for the Tracey Ullman show:

Polly Platt: What’s funny now, because he’s so rich, is that I was driving home from my office at Paramount, very shortly after that, and I saw Matt sitting at the bus stop. He didn’t even have a car. I had no idea he was so poor.

Which says a lot about the US, or maybe just LA.

I’ve just finished Osamu Tezuka’s Apollo’s Song and was going to do a review, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as good as this one from Jog - The Blog. And yeah, the book really is that strange.

Maybe I’m just sentimental, but I thought this was both cute and informative. BBC World Service got a boy born when Tony Blair became Prime Minister to go round interviewing various people about The Blair Years. The best bits for me are when he interviews other kids, because (a) kids say the funniest things (which we often find funny because they are simple and true, which is a bit odd), (b) kids are pretty left-wing, and (c) You don’t get to hear kids talking in a vaguely natural context on the media much, usually the little bastards are trying to sell you something.

Anyway, I liked the interview with Idriss, the kid with the excellent Somali London accent who initially tries to defend Tony Blair on the grounds of investment in schools and so forth, then concedes “Yeah, some don’t like him, because of the Iraq war … and other wars”.

The round-table with a focus-group of ten-year-olds on the priorities for the incoming PM was great, too: I especially loved the way Ben used his chair’s prerogative to completely ignore in his summing-up the strong push from the lobby for being nicer to animals.

As I can’t blog here in work cause we’re still on stupid Explorer, I’ve been reduced to doing my dirty work elsewhere, so here

I’m sure this is very bad blogging etiquette, but I hope you like the colour scheme.

I remember, quite a long time ago, being quite excited by the rumour that Stanley Kubrick was making a film (said to be A.I. at the time, which doesn’t make a great deal of sense now) about a boy growing up by sporadically shooting sequences of the same actor over a period of years. What a concept! And it occured to me while reading this preview of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that the HP series is probably the only time this extreme time-lapse approach of seeing people grow up in front of you has ever actually been pulled off. Albeit not quite the way Stanley Kubrick would have done it. I’ve only seen two of the films but I wonder what it would be like to watch them back to back when they’re all done? (Apart from ‘tiring’).

First rule of Ceann-Comhairling, just like teaching, is don’t let the little bastards see they can wind you up.

Loving some of the comments on YouTube:

I will remind the Deputy, I will remind the Deputy, I will remind the Deputy, I will remind the Deputy, I will remind the Deputy…

Stick a dance beat behind that and you’ll have a dead cert for number 1 on your hands…