Sometimes – just sometimes – I find Americans really annoy me. Not all of them, not by a big way. That link there though is a prime example of the ones that do infuriate me. Insular, self-centred, dumb, no idea of their own country’s history, let alone of world history.

I don’t even know if it’s worth drawing this person’s site to other people’s attention, but there we go.

Had to laugh at this :

I am 57% Tortured Artist

Art is significant in my life, people are scum but I have the capicity to deal with it. Give it a few more years and I will either forget about art or hate the world.

Take the Tortured Artist Test at fuali.com

Do I remember where I was?

Hell yes, I do remember. I was sat halfway up the Arndale Tower in Manchester. Not the best of days to be in a tower, obviously, but there we go.
I remember being the person everyone was coming to for updates (I didn’t have much else better to do that day, to be honest).

So yes, in some ways it did affect me. And so has the aftermath. But it’s also increased my cynicism (some people thought that wasn’t possible, but it was, that’s for sure) about things, and even about the way things have sometimes been hyped out of all recognition by those events. When you see the Stilton Cheese Makers Association wittering on about how “sensitive has been our watchword since 11/9” you know a lot of it is overhyped bollocks.

Yes, the deaths involved are saddening. It was a shock to see something happen on that scale. The entire event actually fulfilled it’s premise – it changed the world. It’s an event that will always be remembered. I just hope that time remembers it for the right reasons – the 3000 dead, the world-changing event – and not for the huge bullshit-mountain that followed it.

And that’s all I’ll say on the subject today.

Thanks, Elayne, for making me laugh. It’s going to be one of those days, can’t you just tell…

Sometimes there are things that happen that just make me laugh at people. Unfortunately, it’s normally something that makes them look stupid, and I end up laughing at them, to their faces. Ooops.

For instance, this morning. Walking through Piccadilly rail station, the woman in front of me tripped slap bang over something in her way that she hadn’t seen. In itself, this wasn’t funny. The funny thing (in my opinion, and it wouldn’t have been funny if I’d done it (actually, I probably would have seen the funny side of it all the same, but I’m weird like that)) was that the item she tripped over was waist-high, dayglo yellow, and marked (in big black letters) “Trip Hazard“.

So yes, I laughed. Unfortunately the woman thought I was laughing at her, which I wasn’t (well, not really, except for being blatantly unobservant, and not really paying much attention to her surroundings – but who pays attention at 8.30 in the morning?) but actually at someone/anyone tripping over a sign that’s warning them about something else they could trip over.

The woman wasn’t amused. She wasn’t hurt either, but that’s by the by. So I walked on, and went to work, still quietly chuckling. Schadenfreude? Maybe. Sense of the absurdity of the world? Most definitely.

Fucking bloody comments systems. I’ve been trying to install one that’ll work using Perl or PHP (I’ve been playing with one of each, before any smart-arse tries to be clever) from one of my other sites where I’ve got them installed.

Basically, I’m totally pissed off with shite like enetation playing silly buggers, so I’m going to end up with one held on one of my own sites. It might make things a little bit more complicated, but in the long run it’ll be for the better I’m sure.

Just bear with me on it, OK?

Does anybody else find they have problems with enetation‘s comments system?

I keep on finding it’s either fucked off out of the page completely for no good reason (it’s there in the source, just the link isn’t appearing), the server’s busy, or some other thing, and I’m lucky if it’s working 25% of the time. Maybe I’m cursed – netcomments fell off the face of the earth within days of me signing up, enetation’s a POS at the moment, and YACCS has seen the light and won’t let me sign up. Bastard things, comments systems.

I’d get one of the Perl-based ones, but my webspace host charges me extra for it. Then again, I don’t pay for bandwidth, so I guess it’s swings and roundabouts really.