Clap Your Hands Say Anything
This is going to seem pretty pointless when I’ve just spent all week doing everything else except post here, but the RSS 2.0 feed for this site is now human-readable—assuming said human is using Mozilla or Firefox. That’s right, I’ve added an XSLT stylesheet to convert it into HTML. All those months of XML work have finally paid off... in the form of a page that isn’t even directly linked from the front of the site (unless you choose Show Site Navigation Bar Always in Mozilla). And if you’re using Safari it overrules my XSLT with its own RSS format and defaults to the 1.0 file anyway (which doesn’t have the XSLT, because it’s RDF); and who knows what happens in IE6/Win, so really, what’s the point.
We interrupt this technological jargon for a public announcement. After Ed and James recommended it, I’ve listened to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s album, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and yeah, my hands are clappin’. It’s folky Radiohead on a Talking Heads retro trip, and it’s not bad, not bad at all. Also, another friend recommended the Arctic Monkeys album that’s been languishing in the upper reaches of the UK charts, and that’s not bad either, in a how-long-before-they’re-the-next-Oasis and I-mean-Oasis-2006-not-1996 kinda way. Plus I finally bought Mylo’s Destroy Rock & Roll a couple of years after his Scottish viral marketing campaign stubbornly refused to infect me. And it’s... not bad. A few too many irritating looped vocal samples, but some nice Airsy-Röyksy-Mintsy electronica happening there.
In keeping with the old-skool Virulent Memes style of this rambling non-sequitur of a post, here’s a couple of photos of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport taken at 5 a.m. local time on my way back from Australia last December.
