Wee Ben just IMed me with an amazing link: WM Team. It’s a German internet company of some sort. They have one of the coolest Flash sites I’ve ever seen. (If you knew how much I hate Flash, you’re realize what a compliment that is.) Make sure you watch the whole intro and then click through the different areas. You can even change the music on the boom box!

The Notre Dame Observer picked up on that “Irish is an ethnic slur” story I mentioned the other day. As expected, nobody on campus agreed.

New Poll: Just to make sure that you’ve all tried out my theme functionality, this week’s poll asks which is your favorite. Personally, I like the green.
 
Results from the old poll: Out of 19 respondents, 10 had positive feelings towards IKEA and 8 had negative. One person had never been to IKEA. I find that… disturbing and sad. There’s nothing wrong with mass-produced, pseudo-European flat-packed modular furniture! (Actually, when I put it that way, it does sound kinda crappy.)

ZDNet mentioned Disturbing Search Requests in a story recently, so if you’re discovering my site via that route, welcome! (And for regular visitors who didn’t know, I get lots of DSR‘s that I share on that site.)

John linked to an interesting story in the Financial Times about personal electronics and the “beauty zone.” The author, Peter Martin, argues that with mobile phones appearance has become as important as functionality. He wonders, though, why that hasn’t happened with PDAs and computers. Personally, I think this guy is a little too dismissive of the steps Apple‘s made in this direction. For example, if you walk down Tottenham Court Road in London on any Sunday afternoon, you’ll discover a crowd – yes, a crowd – of people standing outside the Micro Anvika drooling over Titanium iBooks and Power Mac G4 Cubes with 15-inch flatscreen cinema displays. Computers are more beautiful now than they ever have been before. With any complex mass-produced item, the first versions are always the clunkiest and ugliest (the Model T Ford, the early telephones and televisions, the first radios). Mobiles have had an accelerated pace of aesthetic development because they’re A) relatively cheap and B) show-offable. I mean, when you whip out brushed steel Nokia the size of a matchbox on the Tube, people notice. How many people ever see my iMac? Pretty much just me and Snookums. She’s still damn beautiful though.

It looks like the DeCSS code-crack dispute is back in court. I have more than a passing interest in this case, considering that I possess an illegal copy of the DVD decryption code. Of course, it is on the back of a T-shirt. 🙂

Pubs to stay open round the clock. Hooray! Of course, it’s an obvious ploy from the Labour Party to get re-elected, but I don’t care. It’s absolutely ridiculous that you can’t get a beer in London after 11:00 pm. In college, we never even went out til after 11! England, welcome to the 21st century.

Also note down at the bottom of that same IMDb news page, there’s a blurb entitled “Colin Firth Causes Problems For Bridget Jones Sequel.” And what is it about? “Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding has found a flaw in the adaptation of her sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason — Colin Firth has to be in it twice.” DUH. I’ve been telling everybody I know this for weeks. I don’t really think it’s much of a problem though. The main reason is that the Colin Firth interview in the second book only makes sense when you know about Bridget’s obsession with Pride & Prejudice. Since they cut all of those references in the first film, there’s no reason why they have to include them in the second. Also, as I pointed out before, the second book is really sucky plot-wise anyway and the Colin Firth bit has nothing to do with the storyline, so Fielding might as well lift it out and rewrite the whole thing. And lastly, this stupid blurb makes it sound like Fielding really just forgot that Colin Firth was in the second book. Nobody is that stupid. I think she and the filmmakers made a conscious decision to use Firth in the first film knowing that they’d have problems with a sequel. In my opinion, he was perfect to play Mark Darcy and the value of his performance far outweighs a few missing P&P references. (At least, for most of the non-Austen-fanatic moviegoing public.)

Apparently Calista Flockhart fainted when she heard the news that Robert Downey Jr. had been arrested for drugs again. Fainted. Has any woman actually swooned with emotion since, like, 1885? I suppose when you’re that tiny, any disruption in your trickle of blood flow is enough to bring on a collapse. (It’s horrible, but I found this really funny: “Everyone ran over and tried to revive her. David’s face was pale but Calista, who is usually very pale, was as white as a sheet.” Of course she’s pale, she’s a skeleton.)

Have you been following the David Horowitz story? He’s a journalist and “conservative provacateur” who sent ’round an advertisement attacking the notion of slavery reparations to dozens of American universities. When many of them refused to print it (or did print it and then published apologies), he accused them of censorship and claimed that his real point had to do with the First Amendment and the liberal press. It’s become a real headache for a lot of college papers and some of them are even revising their advertising guidelines. (For the record, my alma mater was among those who declined to print it.) Anyhoo, another Salon writer decided that if Horowitz is gonna try to paint the conservatives as the real defenders of the First Amendment, he’d put it to the test. So he devised an ad that said “God is an abortionist” and sent it to several prominent conservative universities. Needless to say, only one out of eleven printed it. I wonder what Horowitz would say about that?