Year: 2003

This list of the top 100 April Fool’s day hoaxes of all time is actually quite entertaining. What struck me while reading through it, though, is just how gullible some people (well, a lot of people actually) can be.

Well, there’s a lesson for anybody forwarding on all those Bill Gates will give you money emails, contemplating joining Cilla Black’s pyramid selling scheme, or sending me that piece from the Weekly World News about the time travelling wall street trader being busted for insider trading.

Oh, and I spotted a couple of good April Fool jokes myself yesterday. The Guardian hid theirs away in the Education section (something about Carole Caplin being appointed the education regulator: “to avoid picking someone with a conflict of interest, we picked someone with no experience or qualifications whatsoever… she’ll be bringing degrees in assisted showering and shopping to the traditional universities…”), and this RFC on setting the “evil bit” in IPv4 communications was doing the rounds at work yesterday. Ok, I admit it, I’m a geek…

Oh, and my favourite one out of the list of hoaxes is #69. It was apparently in The Times in 1991, and discussed a plan to double the capacity of the M25 by making it one way only during the week:

“On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays the traffic would travel clockwise; while on Tuesdays and Thursdays it would travel anti-clockwise.”

Fantastic. Many gullible people protested about this, but my favourite comment was this one: “A resident of Swanley, Kent was quoted as saying, ‘Villagers use the motorway to make shopping trips to Orpington. On some days this will be a journey of two miles, and on others a journey of 117 miles. The scheme is lunatic.'”

Wow. That didn’t take long. Rather glad I got my ticket yesterday, but now that it is sold out (or at least appears to be), I will only be really happy when I have those tickets in my grubby little hands. (That confirmation email is really not enough to satisfy my paranoia that something might have gone wrong…)
Can’t wait though.

By the sounds of it, from reading the forums on the official website, a lot of people have been buying multiple tickets in order to sell their leftovers on ebay and make a tidy profit. [After reports last year of people reselling tickets for several hundreds of pounds just before the event]. There are a load of tickets on offer on ebay, most of which are at double their face value already.

Personally, adopting the moral high ground for a second, I think this is a rather sad indictment of the greed-based society we live in, not to mention totally contrary to the spirit of the festival. I suppose I can only hope that so many extra tickets are floating around that supply actually outstrips demand and drives prices back down closer to face value.

I took Sal up to Bristol this weekend. The weather wasn’t quite as kind to us as it has been recently, but it was still lovely. Wandering around Clifton on a pleasant Saturday afternoon just makes me remember how much I miss the place. I guess you don’t really appreciate it until you leave.

Oh and we visited an extremely sunny Bath on Sunday. Spent some time sitting on the grass by the Royal Crescent… people playing with frisbees… a guy with dreds juggling… the smell of illicit substances being smoked by the gang of 14 year olds behind us…. it’s almost like being at a festival (oh, speaking of which, I just got our Glastonbury tickets. Lovely). In fact, the visit to Bath was only slightly marred by a minor road rage incident when a woman driving her car with the window down pulled up for a second and yelled at me (standing on the edge of the pavement, waiting to cross the road): “why don’t you watch where you’re going?” before driving off and giving me “the finger”.

I’m not sure which part of the pavement she would have had right of way on, so perhaps this was just general advice for the future. I had heard that Bath drivers were pretty ropey, so maybe you’re really not safe on the pavement and she just offers this information to all the visitors she sees around town. Perhaps she shouts other advice out as she cruises around. Things like “visit the roman baths!” and “watch out for pickpockets in the tourist areas!”. Maybe this is a kind of helpful tourettes syndrome.

I really wouldn’t mind, but what bothers me most is that I was so startled by being yelled at from a moving vehicle that I wasn’t able to come up with a witty response, and it was all I could do to reply “why don’t you watch where you’re going?”

The G2 section of yesterday’s Guardian led with a very well written piece about the 24 hour news coverage of the war in Iraq: “And now over to Fairford where there is nothing to see“. The front cover of G2 featured a mock-up of a Sky News style screen with the caption along the lines of: “Poorly sourced rumour elevated to status of major news event”.
A ticker running along the bottom of the screen said: “insignificant development presented out of context”.

All very biting and onion-esque, you might say. Unfortunately, the fact that the front page of the main paper contained both these things somewhat detracted from the point (the “3AM news” story about a “massive convoy” breaking away from Basra, that later turned out to consist of 3 tanks).

In other developments, I was having a quick look through the log files for the Paste website yesterday, and I noticed something interesting… in the list of domains from which people have been accessing the website is one particularly intriguing domain: usmc.mil (that’s the US Marine Corps by the way). Somehow, I suspect that this is not a marine with a penchant for creative writing (although if it is, why don’t you get in touch; maybe there’s something you’d like to submit to the magazine?). Anyway, I had a look back through the old logs to see where this domain first appears, and it’s in the logs for February and March this year, but not before. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I suspect there is some echelon-style system at work here, crawling the web for keywords and flagging certain sites for further investigation. So what changed on the site in February that started ringing alarm bells on the US military computer systems? Me slagging off the Brit awards? Linking to the Guardian? Or could it perhaps be the entries for the 17th and 13th February, where I refer in passing to the “security measures” at Heathrow. Should I expect the Feds to turn up on my doorstep tomorrow? (If so, lads, could you leave it till after 10:30? I’d like a bit of a lie-in. It is Saturday, after all…)

Oh well, if Big Brother really is watching, why don’t we give them something to do. Altogether now, in a “Father Jack” style: GUNS! TANKS! BOMBS!

Oh, and here’s a link you might be interested in:

Bushwhacked 2 (from the genius that is Chris Morris, you’ll need Quicktime for this one).

Clearly the IT department really do know what they’re doing, as they just shut down my email account nearly a month early. Well if you don’t want me to do any work in the meantime, that’s just fine with me lads…

As an addendum to the whole Amazon debacle of last week, Ikea seem to be getting in on the act. Check out the price of the STURE storage unit. Hmm. I’ll have 200 please….

[UPDATE: This page of the Ikea website has now changed. There used to be an item on this page priced at £0]

It’s been a long time coming, but there’s new TV Go Home. Ah, lovely.

UPDATE: Oh, I almost forgot to mention. It was my absolute pleasure over the weekend to see the first episode of The People’s Book Of Records from Zeppotron, the people responsible for TV Go Home. It looks like it could be the worst programme ever, but it’s actually very, very funny. The record for “Getting closest to Idaho in 20 seconds” was my personal favourite.

Oh, and this isn’t very funny. It’s just a bit sad, really.

Nice to see the BBC acting sensibly as always. The track “Bandages”, by Hot Hot Heat, has been removed from the Radio 1 playlist, because of a “prevalence of the word ‘bandages’ in the song”.

Hmm. 3:50pm, and I finally have network and email access back. Now there’s an IT department that knows what it’s doing. It’s not like this company makes network management software or anything.

Something has gone wrong with the network connection on my work laptop this morning, so I’m reduced to surfing the Internet on one of the departmental Solaris machines while I wait for it to be fixed. Ordinarily, I might be concerned about my inability to work, but given that I’m just counting down my notice at the moment, the care factor, as you might say, isn’t really there anymore.

Then again, somehow any minor gripes I might have seem rather inconsequential at the moment. I try to watch the news, but it just makes me feel sick. Of course, it’s easy for me to be sanctimonious from half a world away. I can turn the TV off. Not everybody has that luxury.