"And then he said..."

That's it. I want to move to Bozeman, Montana. It just seems so much more peaceful there.

Bozeman and district police reports

• An intoxicated woman on West Oak Street was having personal problems with a neighbor. She was told to leave her neighbor alone.
• A man's “soon to be ex-wife” stole the hubcaps off his vehicle parked on Border Lane.
• A woman might have been poked with a needle while she was at a party.

Hat tip: SuSuBelle on the Heck's Kitchen zonkboard. Heck's Kitchen - for all your counter-culture, hot sex and kitten porn needs, daily (almost).

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The last 20 visits to the Journalspace version of this blog from Google used the following search terms (just so you know what the world is interested in…

23 Jan, Mon, 03:25:23: vinyl shirt little briton
23 Jan, Mon, 09:29:17: destruction doncaster dome (Does anyone know what this is? I get it lots, especially after Human League tours)
23 Jan, Mon, 10:20:17: oaten's wife knew (Hope she did, fear she didn't…)
23 Jan, Mon, 10:30:07: mark oaten latest
23 Jan, Mon, 12:17:08: mark oaten joke
23 Jan, Mon, 13:17:45: mark oaten jokes rent boy
23 Jan, Mon, 13:23:36: human league things dreams are made of (Top song!)
23 Jan, Mon, 13:46:04: mark oaten and wife bisexual (What? Both of them? Unlikely)
23 Jan, Mon, 14:15:31: Simon Hughes + rent boy (This was somebody in Parliament, according to the IP address. Shame on you)
23 Jan, Mon, 15:18:49: mark oaten joke
23 Jan, Mon, 15:19:39: And then
23 Jan, Mon, 15:25:44: mark oaten
23 Jan, Mon, 15:29:39: mark Oaten and rent boys
23 Jan, Mon, 16:46:04: “Mark Oaten” rent boys
23 Jan, Mon, 16:58:06: MARK OATEN
23 Jan, Mon, 18:02:04: mark oaten rent boy
23 Jan, Mon, 18:19:33: oaten guido (Fight to the finish, and I know who I'll be cheering on)
23 Jan, Mon, 21:01:13: Mark Oaten wife
23 Jan, Mon, 21:41:03: football player loses finger (It's a long story, it ends in tears and it happened in Switzerland. Don't ask.)
23 Jan, Mon, 22:41:04: what has simon oaten been doing (Who the hell is Simon Oaten?)

Depressing, isn't it?

Is there no end to her talents?

Sent by :

My heartfelt appreciation goes out to all of you who have taken the time and trouble to send me “forwards” over the past 12 months.

I want to wish each and everyone of you a very Merry Christmas and a very prosperous New Year.

Thank you for making me feel safe, secure, blessed, and wealthy.

Extra thanks to whoever sent me the one about rat shit in the glue on envelopes, because I now have to go get a wet towel every time I need to seal an envelope.

Also, I scrub the top of every can I open for the same reason.

Because of your concern, I no longer drink Coca Cola because it can remove toilet stains and may eat my guts out as well.

I no longer drink Pepsi or Dr. Pepper since the people who make these products are made by atheists bastards who refuse to put “Under God” on their cans.

I no longer use cling film in the microwave, because it causes cancer.

I no longer check the coin return on pay phones, because I could be pricked with a needle infected with AIDS.

I no longer use cancer-causing deodorants, even though I smell like a water buffalo on a hot day.

I no longer go shopping , because someone might drug me with a perfume sample and rob me.

I no longer receive packages from, nor send packages by UPS or FedEx since they are actually, Al Qaeda in disguise.

I no longer answer the phone because someone will ask me to dial a number for which I will get a phone bill with calls to Jamaica, Uganda, Singapore, and Uzbekistan.

I no longer eat KFC, because their “chickens” are actually horrible mutant freaks with no eyes or feathers.

I no longer have any trainers — but that will change once I receive my free replacement pair from Nike.

I no longer have to buy expensive chocolates from Thorntons since I now have their secret recipe.

I no longer worry about my soul, because at last count, I have 363,214 angels looking out for me in addition to all of you dear friends.

Thanks to you, I have learned that God only answers my prayers if I forward an e-mail to seven hundred of my friends and make a wish within five seconds.

I no longer have any savings, because I gave it to a sick girl who is about to die in the hospital (for the 1,387,258th time)..

I no longer have any money at all - but that will change once I receive the £15,000 that Microsoft and AOL are sending me for participating in their special e-mail program.

Yes, I want to thank you so much for looking out for me that I will now return the favor!

If you don't send this damn e-mail to at least 144,000 people in the next 7 minutes, a large flock of pigeons with a wicked case of diarrhea will land on your head at 5:00 PM this afternoon and shit all over you.

I know this will occur, because it actually happened to a friend of my next door neighbor's ex-mother-in-law's second husband's third cousin's beautician.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Excellent, if rather scary, piece on the past, present and future of the Net here on wired.com (found via Michael Hanscom). It starts off utopian, heralding the marvels of an internet where ordinary people have created the grandest knowledge base and network in history…

The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive.

How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan.

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works.

This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze of a spot in the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking. Recall the past? It's there. Or listen to the daily complaints and travails of almost anyone who blogs (and doesn't everyone?). I doubt angels have a better view of humanity.

But by the end, the vision has become positively apocalyptic, a blinding picture of a all-pervasive world-wide computer network straight out of a sci-fi nightmare - but a nightmare so dazzling in its possibilities that the writer is evangelical in his advocacy of it. Having celebrated the manner in which ordinary Net users have wrested power from the corporations that expected to control and filter the internet on their behalf, he fails to see that in his version of the future there's been another power shift - away from the user and to a machine with no 'off' switch.

Who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge.

The human brain has no department full of programming cells that configure the mind. Rather, brain cells program themselves simply by being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the Web OS, thereby programming the Machine by using it.

What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy.

Legend has it that Ted Nelson invented Xanadu as a remedy for his poor memory and attention deficit disorder. In this light, the Web as memory bank should be no surprise. Still, the birth of a machine that subsumes all other machines so that in effect there is only one Machine, which penetrates our lives to such a degree that it becomes essential to our identity - this will be full of surprises. Especially since it is only the beginning.

Brain-stretching stuff.

Drink deep, folks

Some of the best of the blogs today:

Make My Vote Count: Being British is Great

We did not panic, we did not crumble. We did not burst into irrational fits of anger and go rushing out looking for a scapegoat, a religious group to lynch or a country to bomb. We decamped to the pubs and took the rest of the day off.

We showed the world how to industrialise, how to play cricket and now we're showing them how to cope in a crisis.

For all of this we should be very, very proud.

Skip's Acorn Treasury: Inspector Fenner

“Will Inspector Fenner please report to the office” they said over the intercom at Euston.

“Oh,” said my flatmate who knows all things. “That's a call sign, you know.”

The sirens went off, and they swept us out of the station.

And then there was a very gentle boom.

The London News Review: A Letter To The Terrorists, From London

What the fuck do you think you're doing?

This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.

Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.

Gia's Blog: Londoners Rule

We are not terrorised.

We are just annoyed.

The Germans tried to terrorise Londoners for 40 nights. Londoners just camped out in the Tube singing songs.

The IRA tried to terrorise the British for decades. The British just used the destruction of buildings as unplanned town planning and revamped their bombed cities.

Now these amateurs think they can scare us by messing up the transport system? Bah. We're just pissed off that we can't meet our friend for coffee in the West End.

Piss off, terrorists. Go pick on someone who gives a shit…. You'll get the reaction you want from Americans. Try them again.*

* not really, obviously

And from the same blog, again:

Gia's Blog: Terror Alert Level: More Beer!

People died today. That's a terrible thing for their families, most certainly. But didn't you kids learn anything last weekend? I mean at least we don't have 50,000 people dying every day here, you know? Jesus, the NHS certainly wouldn't be able to cope with that. And, gosh, I wonder if Iraqis will think what happened in London today is worth even noticing? Get some perspective.

Oh, but Gia, you seem so uncaring, so heartless, people died today blahblahblah…

For a relatively small number of people today was an awful day. I understand that. But every day is the last day of someone's life. Does that mean that the rest of us have to stop living? Of course it doesn't. That is what being a Londoner is all about- just getting on with what you want to do and not letting anyone or anything get in your way.

So, relax, all you non-Brits, let us deal with this. Sit down, have a nice cuppa tea, everything will be fine.

And what about the Olympics, eh? Brilliant. Bloody brilliant.

Bourbon creme?

Pfff: Surviving a Terrorist Attack

The train left the tracks and started to rumble down the tunnel. It was incapable of stopping and just rolled on. A series of explosions followed as if tube electric motor after motor was exploding. Each explosion shook the train in the air and seems to make it land at a lower point.

I fell to the ground like most people, scrunched up in a ball in minimize injury. At this point I wondered if the train would ever stop, I thought “please make it stop”, but it kept going. In the end I just wished that it didn't hit something and crush. It didn't.

Europhobia: London Tube Explosions

Cheers for the messages of support. London's grateful. And we're going to keep our heads. Stiff upper lip and all that - wouldn't do to get all emotional. Hardly British - and if we stop being British about it, the bastards have won. So we'll have a few beers, make as many sick jokes about it in pubs up and down the land as we can, and get on with our lives as normal. Other than causing the grief of too many innocent people, these cunts will have achieved precisely fuck all. We shall not be moved.

Non-trivial solutions: An open letter

To the terrorist cunts who tried to kill me today:

Fuck you. You missed me. Better luck next time.