Somebody’s invented a tractor beam. Seriously. That is so cool.

London provides so much ample fodder for the tabloids. In addition to the protests, the Tube strikes, the foot-and-mouth outbreak, and the general election, we now have the murder trial of one of Fergie’s former aides. The woman beat her lover to death with a cricket bat and left him lying with a knife in his chest. Then she fled and spent several days sending her friends text messages to make it look like she was innocent. The police finally found her – overdosed on pain killers – in her car in Cornwall. So after she was formally charged and the trial was about to begin, she dramatically announced that it was self-defense and that he had raped her on the night of the attack. Today she was cross-examined by the prosecution about clothing she bought while she was on the run from police: “Why a thong if you had been anally raped? Is that the most comfortable garment to wear?” *shudder*

Weirdness. A girl at Saint Mary’s, my university‘s sister school, claims she was sexually assaulted… by another girl. The accused was cleared by a special advisory board, but the alleged victim still claims she’s going to leave school. I don’t know enough of the facts to state any sort of real opinion on the case, except to note that I knew a lot of Catholic girls on campus who were pretty freaked out by lesbianism. It’s not hard for me to imagine that these girls were at a party drinking all night (which they admit), and that later one of them made a pass at the other. I just think it’s sad that what was probably just a misunderstanding has to result in one student leaving the school and another branded as some sort of deviant sexual predator.

Thank God. We’re finally going to get some decent weather in this blasted country. We haven’t had a day where the weather stayed constant yet this Spring. I learned my lesson after the first sunny morning in April, when I left the house in capri pants and sandals and then ended up freezing my bum off when the sky turned dark and the rain came four hours later. “Earlier this week, psychologists warned that the unremitting gloom is affecting the national psyche, dampening our spirits.” That is the understatement of the year.

It appears that the BBC’s website got hacked and a fake news story was inserted about the death of one of the Hear’Say singers. The story itself was entirely made up (she’s not dead; she’s on holiday), but I think the part about the “sex video” is actually true. (True in the sense that all the tabloids reported it a few weeks ago, anyway.) The part that cracked me up, though, is: “The sex video referred to consists of Suzanne stripping off in a Bolton hotel room for a man connected with pop group Right Said Fred.” Weren’t Right Said Fred, uh, gay? My gaydar is notoriously bad, so I might be wrong on this, but I feel like the consensus was that they were. Or maybe I’m just confused because they were camp. Anybody wanna help me out here? (Huh? The official RSF site is hosted at geocities???)

Dan pointed to an interesting bit of software called Janebuilder, which apparently is a “visual editor for PHP”. I like the idea, but the implementation looks rather… cutesy. You drag and drop the little “Auto-Janes” and it generates all the SQL and PHP and HTML for you, so you don’t have to worry your pretty little head about such boring things. I showed it to Snookums and he asked, “Is that ‘programming for girls’?” I sighed and replied, “I think it’s supposed to be.” It’s not that I think it’s a bad idea for an application, but I resent the way they’re marketing it. That’s the sort of thing that makes me want to go back to coding all my stuff in pico just to prove a point.

I haven’t mentioned them yet… but I do want one, of course.

Ever wonder what eToy (that European Internet artists group) thought of the demise of eToys (the online toy shop)? Well, they’ve finally put a statement up on their site. It’s pretty sarcastic. They even offer the eToys founder a place on their board. Heh.

So I get this e-mail, right, from some woman saying that she visited web-goddess and “noticed” that I wasn’t registered on very many search engines. And if I wanted, I could pay her company to list me on 300,000 directories. Uh-huh. So I sent her a snooty e-mail back, saying that if she had, in fact, visited my site, she would’ve seen that it’s a personal site and I could care less about advertising myself. I also sarcastically thanked her for the spam. I BCCed Snookums on the message to get his response. He said:

snookums: Your e-mail is very polite. I’d probably put something like: “I’d love to buy your product. In fact I have a purchase order, if I can just remember where it is. Spammer’s purchase order…. Spammer’s purchase order…. Oh! I remember. I shoved it up my ass. I wrote it out and shoved it right up my ass, therefore ruining any chance you had of selling me your lame services.”

I’m still laughing. If you don’t immediately get the reference, it’s from the “Jesus vs. Satan” episode of “South Park” where Cartman is explaining why he didn’t invite Pip to his birthday party.

Whoa! According to my server logs, I had a visitor from the Naturist UK FactFile website. Hello, nude people! (For the record I’m not a nudist, but I do like their jaunty slogan: “Take off your clothes and live!“)