Most of the late-1988 UK number ones currently under discussion at Popular are awful, but one stands out, for me at least. Other commenters gave it an average mark of 4 out of 10, but then most of them don’t care for this band at all...
Read MoreThe Occasional Navel-Gazing What-Am-I-Doing-Here Post
Two years ago I wrote about taking a break from blogging because I was sick of the sound of my own voice. Nowadays I’m feeling the opposite, that I miss all the odd ways it used to echo around this cavernous site and feed back into my head, and desperately want to get back to it all... but can’t. All the stuff on my plate at work this year has crowded out any hope of it, and in the odd snatches of time that do occur it’s easier to contribute to other conversations than to cook up something new here. Not that there’s been any conversation here for a while... even a photo of an upended BMW hasn’t raised a peep. Turns out that reducing your posts to a trickle for a year, taking a break for another year, and then trickling back for a year is a foolproof way to lose an audience.
So, time for a rethink, reboot, redesign, re-something. Maybe I should just embrace all the social networking sites I’ve half-heartedly toyed with and ditch the idea of following some personal out-of-date notion of what blogs should or shouldn’t be. Maybe Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr are all you need, and who cares about bringing it all back home.
This needs further thought, but I’m in the mood to try something radical. Though whatever that turns out to be—assuming I get the time to implement it rather than just carry on by default—the old stuff will remain.
Actually, maybe Further Thought is exactly the problem.
15 July 2010 · 
x5 · Site News
Off-Street Parking
Drummond Street, Edinburgh, 23 June 2010. Mouseover for a better sense of what had happened. Amazingly, no railings seem to have been bent sideways in the process.
For this Popular comments repost, I’m rewinding briefly to a 1987 hit before looping back in time to 1988. Two science-fiction-TV-inspired novelty hits that couldn’t be further apart.
I’ve managed to miss an entire year from my Popular reposts. Although I commented here and there on a few of 1987’s UK number ones, I rated none of them highly enough at the time to buy the singles or related albums, and only the Pet Shop Boys and M/A/R/R/S inspire any music-ownership desires today. 1987 for me meant Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust, new albums from the Hoodoo Gurus and Spy vs Spy (two more Australian acts), Def Leppard’s Hysteria, and my ambivalent feelings towards The Joshua Tree. A long way from Popular’s year, then. But 1988 is turning out to be a little more interesting...
Canon Rebels
A slightly modified version of a comment posted to FreakyTrigger’s canon discussion in March, which I meant to post here but didn’t get around to at the time.
Tweet Nothings, Part 6
Normal service—or whatever normal was before my life got insanely busy—will resume soon. Meanwhile, here’s more Twitter archiving (most course-related tweets excluded), starring the Digital Economy Bill, the general election, and more.
The Trouble With The Trouble With Sloths
Among all the YouTube comments from young American males full of testosterone and ignorance abusing me for my non-American pronunciation in The Trouble With Sloths—ironic, given that it warns against exactly such abuse—a young Australian has challenged my claim that “sloath” is the only Aussie pronunciation (in response to a question about the British, who use both):
i live in australia and we all call them sloths not slowths, i’d never even heard anyone call it a slowth till i watched this video.
Cobbled Together
One more post on the general election outcome, to preserve some comments posted to Metafilter yesterday. Rather than paraphrase them I may as well just post them, along with some further words I didn’t get around to adding there.
May 2010