ET Phone home- to find out wots playing on tha radiogram!!!!!!!!

Have you ever heard some beat music group pumping on tha radiogram and though: "This is a load of complete shit!!!!!!!!! I'd better remember the title of the tune and the group so I can tell all my friends to boycott it!!!!!!"!??!??!?!?!? I know I have!!!!!!! The only problem is, the DJ usually goes: "And that was [mumble mumble] by [mumble mumble]. And next..."!!!!!!!!!!! Bah!!!!!!!!!

But in the spangly future when we're all wearing cheesy silver jumpsuits (Just like in "Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century"!!!!!!!!! Bidibidibidi... etc. !!!!) it might be different!!!!!!! That's because boffins at Phillips (Who are of course related to Mark Phillips, The Duke of Edinburgh, who is married to tha Queen Mum- until she pops her clogs, that is!!!!!!) have developed a spiffy new gizmo by which you can phone up a phone number (On your phone!!!!!!!! You couldn't exactly phone it up on the egg-whisk, could you!!!!! That would be really stupid!!!!!!!!) and place tha phone receiver to the radio for a few seccys- and it'll tell you wot you are listening to!!!!!!!!!!!

Only prob!!!! Wot if it's a really crap record!!!!!!!! Will this compute superserver call up tha police, who will then arrest you for improper use of a criminal record?!??!?!??! And wots wiv this "Kids From 'Fame'" picture with the above article?!?!??!

Beep beep CRASH!!!!!!!!!

Nope!!!!!!!! I'm not talking about Sinclair Spectrums here!!!!!!!!!! Or even PCees minus tha sound-o-gram card!!!!!!!! I am of course talking about mobile phones!!!!!!!!!

Wot!!!!!! You didn't know mobile phones could crash!!!!!!! Well, apparently they can, and can do by merely receiving a text msg!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yep, it's another bizzare tecchy security exploit!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lucky it doesn't work on my phone!!!!!! But then again, that's because my phone's so ancient!!!!! I call people on it in town, and folks come up and ask me why I've stuck my laptop to my cranium!!!!!!!!!!!

Literally overusing "Literally"- literally!!!!!!!!!!!!!

U-no how some daft tabloidy hacks like using the word "literally" a lot?!?!? Stuff like:

"Literally all kinds of cars are at this motor show!!!!!!" [Wot!!! Even Reliant Robins?!?!??!]

"Literally everyone who was anyone was at this film premiere!!!!!" [Wot, like, did they dig up Perry Como so he could go along as well?!??!?!]

"This funky chune is literally a classic!!!!!!!!!!" [Wot, like Jane Austen or sometihng!??!?!?!?]

And so on!!!!!!!! Well, according to this bloke, such people are a bunch of planks!!!!!! Literally!!!!!! (Well, not really- but they are as thick as two short ones!!!!!!!!!!!!!) In any, it would be safe to say they are literally a bunch of cretins!!!!!!!!

Talk about manic depressive!!!!!!

"I make myself laugh at everything, for fear of having to weep at it" -Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. [Crikey!!!!! If I had a name like yours, I might feel the same way too!!!!!!!]

Coincidence or wot?!?!?!

On this day in 1965, Mary Whitehouse started her "clean up tha tellybox" campaign!!!!!!!!! Which is jolly odd, because last Friday, she ended it- by dropping dead!!!!!!!!!!

Scrooge- with copyrights!!!!!

I suspect some young whippersnappers might not have read Charles Dicken's "A Christmas Carol"!!!!!! So, if you have to explain to them what it's about, don't go "Oh you know!!!!!!!! It's the one with Scrooge in it!!!!!! You know!!!!!!!!! SCROOGE!!!!!!!! The miser!!!!!!!! It's set in the Victorian... Oh forget it, go and watch Hollyoaks then!!!!!!!!"!!!!!!!! What you really should be saying is: "It's about this guy called Scrooge, who's a bit like Lars Ullrich out of Metallica", and they'll immediately understand what you mean!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's because according to some legal boffin by the name of Lawrence Lessig says that todays equivalents of Scrooge are excessive "copyright hoarders"!!!!!!!!

Blimey!!!!!!! Does that mean Napster is Ghost of Xmas Past, and Bob Cratchit uses Gnutella/Musicity/Freenet/Ploppytrader?!?!?!?

Hack a site- with Google!!!!!!!

Now!!!! Google!!!!! Rather tip-top searchy tool, no?!?!?!? And especially, if like, you have tha supey-dupey browsey-wowsey Opera, you'll be using it all the time for searching!!!!!! But it looks like some people are also using it- for hacking!!!!! Apparently you can use Google to search for vunerable NetWeb pages!!!!!!!!!

Now you'll have to find another boring Windoze game!!!!!

Some people said my decision to return to doing SC (By which I of course mean the venerable organ wot you are reading- with your eyes!!!!! And by organ I of course mean this w3page, not a Bontempi or Hammond "Leslie" thingy!!!!!! I mean, what would you be able to read there!!!!! Well, OK, maybe the labels on the buttons, but that would be really stupid!!!!!!) Erm, anyway!!!!!!!! They said the act of moi el returno to Senior Citizen would be like entering a minefield- literally!!!!!!!! I said: "Don't be so flipping stupid!!!! I have no plans to go anywhere near Afghanistan!!!!!"

Having said that, you can get a flavour of the unfortunate predicament of the Afghanis without risk to life and limb- by playing a game in Windoze!!!!!!!! Yes, I am of course talking about Minesweeper, the classic WinTelApp in which you randomly click at blank grey square until you die, or, if you're really good, carefully analyse each result in order to pick the next square to click, then when you have to make a guess, randomly click a square and die!!!!!!!!!!!!

But if you're playing Minesweeper as a sustained political thought experiment on the morality of landmines, what else do you play for fun?!?!?! Yes, that's right Freecell, the barely penetrable Windoze "card" game!!!!!! Until now!!!!!!! Yes, now there's a Freecell solver program!!!!!!!!

Now all we need is a "Minesweeper Solver", and show those US military folks in Afghanistan how to do it!!!!!!!!!

Clone claims crap!!!!!!!!!

Well, you might be dimly aware that some boffins have done a clone of a human bean!!!!!! Cue lotsa guff about Brave New World and Emergency Bills in the Houses of Parliament!!!!!!!!!!

But what our venerable representatives (By which I mean Members of tha UK Parliament, not Brian and Helen from Big Brother!!!!) might not know is that they might be passing a law against something which comes out of one's backside!!!!!!!!!!! Because it's increasinly looking like this "FIRST HUMAN BEING CLONED!!!!!!!!!!!" story is increasingly looking like a pile of crap!!!!!!!! And even worse, some "maverick" groups on the "fringe" are jumping on tha bandwaggon!!!!!!

Jack McConnell: The Next Osama BinLid!??!?!?

Well, Jack McConnell is now First Minister of the country wot I live in (Scotland!!!!! Not England, as some of you geographically challenged people might think!!!!!!! Actually, "geographically challenged" sounds like someone who is restricted in a geographical sense, and therefore might not be the most appropriate appelation at this juncture!!!!!! Unless of course you happen to be in prison!!!! Or you're in the US, have a slightly darker skin colour, and can speak other languages in addition to English!!!!!!!!! But in latter case, if you're educated enough to know more than one language, the chances are that you might be educated enough to know that Scotland and England are not the same flipping country!!!!!! Erm, where was I??!?!?!?) Oh yes!!!! McConnell!!!!! Comes across as a very nervous man, as tho he's manager of Partick Thistle Football Club!!!!!!!! (Or, as those who look at the tellybox scoreboard call it, "Partick Thistle Nil"!!!!!!!!!!!!!) But in the first couple of hours of being Top Scot Dog, he done away with 5 ministers from his cabinet!!!!!!! (Which is a jolly odd place to keep them if you ask me!!!!! Shouldn't they be in an office or something!??!??!) But it's even worse, according to this "analysis" article:

When Jack McConnell said there wouldn't be a night of the long knives he was right. This reshuffle was more like the St Valentine's Day massacre. Just when we thought we were in for a period of consolidation under the new first minister, suddenly there is blood all over the cabinet table and there are bodies lying on the steps of Bute House. Jack McConnell decided that he needed to impose his authority over a sometimes fractious ministerial team by the most ruthless means.

Crikey!!!!!!! Talk about Mr Dangerous!!!!!! Let's hope Georgy W doesn't decide to defend America against terrorism by straegically nuking Edinburgh!!!!!! That would really ruin the area!!!!! There wouldn't be any decent pubs left for a start!!!!!!!!

Make Your Compute Faster- cheat!!!!!

You know how it feels!!!!! Or maybe you don't!!!!!!! OK then, you can imagine how it feels!!!!!! Or maybe you can't!!!!!! But, anyway, if you can, you know how it feels!!!!!!!!!! Especially when you make bits of the insides for your PeeCee compute thingy!!!!!

Take for example, ATI, who made their lovely new videogram card for da PeeCee, and said it was really suped-dupey because it played Quake II faster than other cardz!!!!!! Then someone found out that when you rename Quake III to a different filename, it isn't faster!!!!!!!

Yep, you guessed it, the driver files for the card recognise the filename for Quake III, and slightly downgrade all the phung shading and texture raytracey bits so that it runs faster!!!!! And for some odd reason, some people are more than a little miffed at this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Elvis- with a trowel!!!!!

Hmmmm... I would have thought people had stopped looking for an activity to be the "New Rock 'n' Roll" after "BritPop" was briefly the New Rock 'n Roll until someone realised that reheated rock 'n' roll actually wasn't really all that good!!!!!! But someone's still banging on about the New Rock 'n' Roll!!!!!! Which is, erm, Landscape Gardening!!!!!!!!!!!

So know you can swivel your pelvis in Shea Stadium- whilst doing the weeding!!!!!!!!!! Maybe they could get the Queen Mum to swivel her hips- it should be easy for her, as she's had so many hip replacement operations, she can probably spin her pelvis around, like a spinning top!!!!!!

Now it's not very funny- in Lego!!!!!

Now, this is a bit sad!!!!!! We've already mentioned people doing really sad things with Lego, like Lego album covers and Lego video nasties!!!!!!! But now Lego themselves have topped it all by merging one sad tradition with another to come up with what some folks might term to be "something completely different"!!!!!!!!! If they're complete pillocks!!!!!!!

Yes, I am of course talking about those young whippersnappers who decide to propel themselves up every right-thinking person's nostril by reciting sketches from Monty Python!!!!!!!!!! And the people who find it just as funny the 24 bazillionth time they've heard it!!!!!!!!!!! So wot do Lego do but give us, but Monty Python and the Holy Grail- The Lego Version!!!!!!!!! I ask you!!!!!!!!! What is the world coming to?!?!??!

Mind you, having though about it, maybe Lego are extracting tha urine in a very subtle way!!!!! After all the Lego People figures have a daft fixed grin- just like the prannets who re-enact Monty Python sketches 36 gazillion times!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Phew, crikey!!!!! Have I been in a TARDIS or wot!??!?!?

Here I was, just coming back into society after a couple of months hard coding as part of a megabucks ultraflashy XML w3project for a booze company, and I find the world's suddenly changed in my absence!!!!!!! Not only have a bunch of idiots flown planes into a major symbol of world capitalism causing untold death and destruction, and both financial and political ructions, the US is getting awfully angry about everything and seriously endangering it's "Land of the Free" tagline, and everyone else is getting all panicky!!!!! And that's even before all that Anthrax malarkey!!!!!!!!! I was waiting at the bus stop yesterday, and coughed a bit- and suddenly everyone speedily donned gasmasks!!!!!!!

Honestly!!!!!! Do I have to hold all your hands or something??!?!??!? What you young whippersnappers need is a bit of fortitude or whatnot!!!!!! Things might be bad now, but you'll get through if you don't all go mad running around like decapitated poultry of the avian variety!!!!!!! And I should know, I've been through the Blitz!!!!!

Maybe while Georgy W's still got high popularity ratings, he should rewrite that famous speech by Churchill!!!! (After all, he's ripped off "Those who are not with us are against us" from Jesus!!!!!!) You know the sort of thing: "We shall fight them on the beaches, erm, of Khandahar..." OK then, scratch that idea!!!!!!! Just bring back Vera Lynn!!!! It would be an improvement on Maria Carey, let's face it!!!!!!!!!!

Olympiad- gone mad?!??!?!

According to my calender, on this day in 1900, "after 5 months the Paris Olympic Games closed"!!!!! Why!??!?!? Had it run out of money?!?!??! Was everyone completely sick of it after 5 months, and started doing silly stuff!??!?!?! We need to know!!!!!!!!!!