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.

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.

SEO

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.

Thanks to Jann for alerting me that my “last five comments” script was barfing all over the page. The bug has been fixed!

This article about Niki Taylor’s accident is confusing. It says she’s in critical condition, then flashbacks to the accident and reports that she wasn’t thrown from the car and everybody thought she was unhurt. But it never mentions how she went from “stomach pains” to “critical condition.” There’s just this odd hole in the story where you feel like it should go.
 
My first SassyYou’re probably wondering why I even care about some injured supermodel. It’s quite simple, really. Niki Taylor reminds me of the Golden Age of “Sassy.” Yes, “Sassy” Magazine. I seem to remember them doing a story about the death of her sister and that’s when I became aware of her. I was a devoted reader for many years, back when it was cool and intelligent and every article wasn’t about boys or clothes. Unfortunately as we faithful subscribers know, in 1994 “Sassy” was taken over by the pod people of Petersen Publications, who turned it into yet another YM/Seventeen/Tiger Beat clone. If you too mourn the old “Sassy”, you’re in luck. I managed to find a wonderful memorial page with links about the takeover and why the old version was so cool, an exhaustive “Sassy” archive with loads of old stories, and snarly.com, the personal site of old-school “Sassy” writer Marjorie Ingall.
 
(Could I have used “sassy” one more time? It reminds me of that old skit on “Saturday Night Live” where Phil Hartman played the magazine’s senior editor and would say everything was “sassy-licious”. You can hear some of these sound clips here. Remember when he interviewed Christian Slater as the “Sassiest Guy in America”?)
 
Boy, I’m really going off on some tangents today.

Did I mention I joined a health club? I know, that sounds so ridiculous and posh coming from me, but I’m tired of sitting on my ass (literally) all day long and not feeling well. I’m hoping a little yoga and spinning and stair-climbing will shake me out of my stupor. Why don’t I just run in the park, you ask? Easy, because I loathe running with an all-consuming passion. The only time I could ever bring myself to do it was in tennis practice in high school, when our coach basically forced us to. Of course, that was the fittest I’ve ever been in my life. Could there be a connection? Nahhhh.