My bookmarks of the year 2007 - part 2
Yesterday I started having a delve through some of the things I had bookmarked on del.icio.us during the course of 2007, partly as an exercise to decide whether to start integrating these into the currybetdotnet blog and RSS feeds.
In my recent 8 random facts about me post I revealed that I used to have a terrapin. My better half also volunteers here in Crete to help the ARCHELON society for protecting turtles. Which is why I was delighted to come across this Turtle tracking map, which plots the depth and course of a green sea turtle called Claudia.
I didn't bookmark much Doctor Who stuff this year - but I did get sent several links for Who-related merchandise, of which this was surely the coolest - the TARDIS 4-way USB hub.
Word reaches the Biased BBC bunker of an exciting new blog was one of my favourites from Biased BBC this year. It mentioned one of my articles, and said that I included:
"a stylish photo of Nick's Pravda article - showing a drawing of a resident of the Biased BBC bunker being tapped on the shoulder by the BBC Big Brother."
In fact, the graphic illustrated the exact opposite, a lone BBC staffer being tapped on the shoulder by the all-seeing watchful pointy-finger of Biased BBC - but as I've always maintained, bias is so often in the pre-conceived idea of the beholder...
Speaking of bunkers, I rather enjoyed this self-styled unreliable and wholly unofficial history of BBC Television Centre. Another bit of BBC history was served up in this article about the specially designed font used for BBC subtitles - however after about the first paragraph I got somewhat lost in the minutiae of typography and on-screen graphic generation.
Another page I bookmarked about much earlier in the history of the BBC was this one about The 1933 'Silvatone' Recording: The Earliest Known Recording of Broadcast Television:
"The images on the disc are a revelation for our understanding of 30-line television. From a highly-damaged disc of a recording made at the original owner's home in Ealing using domestic equipment connected to a domestic wireless receiver tuned to the BBC's vision transmission in the Medium Wave band, we now have four minutes of recognisable and entertaining television. This is completely contrary to our conditioned expectations on these 30-line transmissions."
Jem spotted this fantastic attack on the BBC from godlike genius Mark E. Smith:
"I do watch TV, too much - you've got to know your enemy. Its fucking pathetic. I don't know how they get away with it, especially the BBC. Me mam gets £70 a week as a pensioner and she has to pay £120 a year to watch people doing their fucking houses up. You can see that anywhere. If you want to see fucking builders, you can just look out of the window."
Meanwhile around the time that the BBC was announcing a slashing of jobs and budgets, The Telegraph helpfully pointed out some areas where the Corporation might be able to trim some fat - BBC's website oddities. As I've said elsewhere, picking on h2g2 for being esoteric is like taking sweets from children - but it was delightful that the day The Telegraph published this, the lead item on their UGC initiative was all about the very serious matter of Boris Johnson making jam...
The BBC World interactive billboard campaign in the U.S., where texting participated in a vote, was generally well received as a clever bit of advertising. But not here on this post - Memo to BBC World: Thanks for nothing which accuses the adverts of simplifying complex issues and stifling political debate in the USA.
Finally on the topic of the BBC, this page just goes to show that the more things change, the more things stay the same. It features The Daily Mail being snooty about how much money BBC stars are earning, and a damning review of a new sitcom asking why the BBC can't make decent comedy, like it used to in the golden age of television. The clippings are, of course, from the early 1970s, and about that well-known waste of the Licence Fee, Fawlty Towers.
A lot of people who advocate making everything into a wiki and support the free distribution of user-edited knowledge seem to have very little understanding of how much work people are prepared to undertake in order to subvert it for a couple of Euro. Reading The Dark Side of Wikipedia should put them right about the motives of some regular contributors - people are prepared to make thousands upon thousands of small edits to build up their reputation, before injecting their one spammy link.
In a variation on the spam theme, I was amused by the story of Marek W. from Cieszyn who was accused of Google bombing to make Polish president Lech Kaczynski rank #1 for the Polish word for penis. I loved the quote from him:
"I just wanted to verify my skills and check if the software works"
Now, if you are reading this in the office, you might want to skip to something else, as the next couple of my favourites from this year involve a lot of swearing. Of the very worst kind.
Earlier in the year Steven Bywater, Derby County's goalkeeper, used a very naughty word on Sky TV, and as an indirect result Claire Tomlinson ended up being 'rested' by the station. Mr Blackett was not amused in his post "Dear Steven Bywater, you're a 'C U N T'"
"You have set a new low for footballer idiocy. At least Ron Atkinson had the excuse of thinking he was off-air. You just sat there on live TV, got asked a question and thought 'I can't think of a replacement for the word 'cunt' so I'll spell it out, I'm a fucking genius'. Bravo, you braindead twat, fucking bravo."
There is also a lot of entertaining swearing in the reaction on the Devil's Kitchen to reports that fat people in Britain couldn't help themselves because of external factors - Great Fat Britain:
"Tell you what, Dawn; I have the solution. Abolish the Welfare State. And, in particular, abolish Child Benefits. Your government has consistently raised Child Benefits and one could suggest a correlation between that and fatter children.
Because, Dawn, you will find that poor people get really thin really quickly, by virtue of not being able to afford to eat. I myself, a six foot man, dropped to just above eight stone at one point. Try having no money, Dawn; it works wonders for your figure."
Earlier in the year Devil's Kitchen was also quite vocal on the subject of not taking everything scientists predict as gospel - pointing out that if everything they said had been in true back in the days when Conservative ministers were force-feeding their children beefburgers, people in Britain would currently be dropping dead like flies from vCJD
Faced with a total fucking lack of Armageddon, scientists had to continue to justify their grants. "Ah," they said in a panic, "actually vCJD probably has a 50 year incubation period." Really?
And finally...
On a lighter, and less sweary note, I discovered this little nugget by Googling my wife's name. Apparently she was one of the main characters in a 1940s serial adventure - Manhunt of Mystery Island. She was portrayed by Linda Starling, seen below in costume. A costume from a different adventure I presume, as I've never seen my Claire Forrest go out dressed like that!
