Dog in the Playground!Guarantees that its opinions will not be swayed by ‘facts’

Very weird, it turns out that there is a common language link between sea-pirates and garden-cookery.

The native tribes of the Caribbean developed a wooden frame for smoking meat, which they called “buccan”. This method of cooking became popular among that particular subset of Europeans who spent much of their time in ships, stopping on small, sparsely populated islands. In other words, it became popular with pirates.

Now, the French sailors pronounced the native word the way the natives did, and so buccan entered French as “boucane” and the people who ate it became boucaniere, which entered Anglicised to buccaneer.

On the other hand, the Spanish duidn’t try and match the native pronunciation and simply called it barbacoa, which then entered English as barbecue.

Fantastic, eh? Two unrelated words, with two unconnected meanings — barbecue and buccaneer — actually have the same parent: a wooden frame used by Caribbean natives to cook meat.

A few years ago now I started work on an automated haiku finder. The script would scan through Twitter’s public feed and identify randomly occurring haiku. I got the script basically working, but could never figure out the last step… what to do with the results.

Today I had a brainwave, and realized that the haiku robot could actually just feed the results straight to a blog, and then complete the circle by using Twitter’s API to feed information back onto Twitter itself.

In a very, very alpha form, the Twitter robot is now live at the following locations

HaikuRobot.blogspot.com
twitter.com/HaikuRobot

He’s still pretty buggy so I’m not going to leave him on 24 hours a day, but he is already turning up some absolutely great haikus:

Santa overdosed??
Merry Christmas Everyone
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVE

Best Christmas ever
Everyone seems to agrees
FART ROBOT APPROVES

How gutted am I
Free time family card games
So pretty and COLD

Still a lot of work to do, he’s not yet notifying people that their tweets formed part of a haiku, and the blog is a mess.

A while ago I saw an amazing video of an incredible light display projected onto a country house. For your enjoyment I have embedded it here. You’ll have to give the video a few minutes to really get going but it is spectacular.

It’s really incredible how the artists use strong contrasts to generate three dimensional effects on a flat building front, and even make it appear like the building itself has disappeared in places. The demolition sequence really got a gasp out of me first time through. Because of this video I was hugely excited to learn of the Durham Lumiere Winter Light Festival in which the cathedral would be illuminated in an animated light show every night. Great! I thought and with memories of that video flashing through my head I turned up, only to be sorely disappointed. The light show consisted entirely of projections of ancient manuscripts onto the cathedral.

The manuscripts did move, I guess. But the effects were barely more impressive than I could have managed by printing a picture onto an overhead transparency then slowly sliding it in front of the projector. One thing at the festival that I did find rather enchanting was this sculpture of a dress, which even from close up appeared to float and shimmer like a ghost. Really, really beautiful.

To finish up this post here is one last video of amazing projection effects on some buildings. I can scarcely believe these are real, I and want to take my hat off to whoever designed them:

Projection on Buildings from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

Start of a new lease of life for this stupid little website? I guess it’s time to be thinking up a good name and/or acronym.

Generally if I need a witty title for something I plagiarize from my friends (hello “Geometric Rate” domain name!) or use a really lame joke ([insert witty title], anybody?). However, this time I wanted a unique and personal title. My first thought was “Dog In The Playground!”. Named for a childhood experience that I remember very vividly.

Imagine yourself as a young child. It’s lunch break at school and you’re tearing around, shrieking wildly and over-committed to your playground games in that earnest and oh-so-important way that all children have about them. Suddenly, you look up and there’s a dog. He’s off his lead and roaming the school grounds. There are shrieks of excitement from the children. The dog is overexcited, yapping and running in circles, darting around legs. The children are overexcited, squealing and sprinting. Teachers can’t calm this situation down because there is a DOG in the PLAYGROUND (“here boy! I bet he comes to me”, “I bet I can catch him”, “That’s my best-friend’s neighbour’s dog”, “A dog bit my dad’s friend and he DIED. Run for it!”). Absolute pandemonium, and a great name for a website, right?

After googling around a little bit* to check that the title would be unique to me I discovered that there is actually a children’s poem called, funnily enough Dog in the Playground, about precisely this thing.

Dog in the playground
What a to-do!
Thirty-five children,
Caretaker too,
Chasing the dog,
Chasing each other

It may not seem it at first glance but this poem is to me a profoundly and deeply upsetting thing. It mirrors, precisely, the feeling of absolute lawlessness and excitement that everybody felt when there was a dog in my playground.

Worse than that, it hits close enough that I’m worried I invented my dog. What if poem-dog was the same one as in my memory? What if I read the poem as a child and in remembering the story twenty three or so years later this fictional creature was plucked out of the page and dropped into my life? For that matter, how much of anything from my childhood can I remember reliably, and how much represents some sort of unintentional cryptoplagarism on my part? I think my playground dog is mine, but that poem hit awfully, eerily close.

I mean, do you even know how easy it is to implant false memories in a child?

“Tommy, do you remember when you cut your hand and had to go to hospital?”

Repeat that a dozen times and Tommy will not only start agreeing that he had been to the hospital, but he will invent all sort of supporting detail (“Yes, the doctor was nice but the room was cold”), and believe it with all of his heart.

So, anyway, I called the blog “Dog in the Playground!” not just because it reminds me of feelings of lawless freedom and fun, but because I can’t help but think about the fragility and unreliability of memory, and the transience being human

Mainly, though, I just really like dogs!

^{* should I capitalize Google when I’m using it as a verb? I have no idea}

For the first ten months of this year I documented my marathon training in a public journal. I have scrubbed all trace of this journal from the internet as it’s by turns painfully dull (Tuesday: ran 8 km, Wednesday: ran 12 km, etc.) and hugely cringeworthy for me to read. Anyway… a couple of race reports and stories are well worth repeating so I’m doing it here (yeah? I’m being self-indulgent? sue me).

21st April 2009
I GOT CHASED BY A FUCKING HORSE. One of the farm paths I often run down has a few horses tethered to one side of the road, including a couple of foals. Today, however, one of the foals had been left untethered and it seemed to be full of energy, cantering and skipping all over the place. Now, when it saw me — a stinking, sweating brightly coloured thing bobbing down the path — it became curious and ran towards me, swerving at the last moment when I didn’t slow down. It then repeated this a few times, it was really fucking weird, running a few meters away, circling round and running really close past me again, almost bouncing off me. I guess it was just playing around, but it was as tall as me and I was shit scared of getting trampled by the thing. Although I briefly considered it, I didn’t think that punching or shoving the horse would be either effective or sensible, and I obviously couldn’t outrun it, so I froze. It ran at me a couple more times, then calmed down, losing interest. When it turned its back I legged it.

Oh… yeah. This is supposed to be a training journal: The run was fine, other than getting chased by a goddamned horse.

1st August 2009
Running protip time!

When you wash your shorts MAKE SURE YOU RINSE ALL (REALLY, ALL) OF THE SOAP OUT OF THEM. I just did a long run, and about 16 km in looked down at my legs. Around the crotch, where the fabric of the two legs rubs together my sweat had soaked the fabric. Soaked, soapy fabric being rubbed together? It lathers up.

I ran the final 16 km of the run with a crotch dripping white, every few minutes the foam would start running down my leg and I’d have to flick it away. I honestly must have looked like some sort of priapic sex-pest, and the white salt stains all over my shirt and muddy legs would probably also qualify me as looking ‘unwashed’.

An unwashed, sweating sex-pest. That’s me that is.

10th August 2009
…
Oh yes, I nearly forgot. Since I’m going on holiday tomorrow I’m trying to empty my fridge of perishables. Today’s dinner? Three chicken thighs and a pile of bacon. Nothing else. I wish I could eat like this every day.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh blog internet wgah’nagl fhtan

That’s right! After a phenomenally successful first series (2006-2008) this site has returned for a second run, with brand a brand new name and design, but hopefully precisely the same mental age.

A few stats on the first season:

• Number of posts: 570
• Number of comments: 51,250
• Number of comments that weren’t spam: 1,421
• Number of visitors: 350,000 (!)

Everything above here is part of “Series 2: The Reckoning!”. Everything below this point was originally written in mid-2008 or earlier, and may images and links are now broken.

Rise! Website! Rise again from the depths of the internet!

I just saw this video and my mind was completely blown, the only description on the video’s page is this:

Originally built in 1901, this walkway now serves as an aproach to makinodromo, the famous climbing sector of El Chorro.

This really doesn’t do it justice, just check this out:

I think I could probably have followed along up to the point where he WAS WALKING ON RUSTY PIPES THOUSANDS OF FEET ABOVE SOME ROCKS.

Balls of steel.

late edit: I just realized that this is exactly like a level out of Half Life

I realize how important it is for consumers to be aware of what they are buying, and that is why I am going to rebrand this site as a consumer reviews portal.

This is my first review:

The Hibachi Dubbel 17″ all steel, quality barbeque

Cost: 6 euros (9 USD, 4.75 GPB)

First impressions upon getting the box are that the BBQ ticks all the tight boxes (barbeque, tick. 100% steel, tick. quality in cooking, tick. cost less than a bottle of wine, tick.) so without wasting any more time I tear open the box, thinking: OK this’ll take about two minutes let’s open her u– What. The. Fuck. Is. This.

To assemble a 6 euro BBQ it appears that you require four different types of screw (over a dozen screws in total), five different types of inscrutable metal thingy and quite a few wooden bits. No problem I think to myself, I’ll just have a look at the instructi- What. The. Fuck. Is. This.

These are not even instructions, This is just a drawing of the second photo in this review, with a list of names for the weird metal bits written next to it. Also note that I am trying to build a BBQ, not the bloody terminator. Then this happened, but in real life

Final mark: 10/10. I like barbecues, and so should you

This is probably the best roadsign I have ever seen:

It got a smile out of me pretty much every time I drove past it. Have you seen any better roadsigns?

This is really amazing, and also really creepy

I can’t even begin to imagine how long it took to make this using only a digital camera

I read this article today, it’s about how archaeology isn’t actually as exciting as Indiana Jones makes out. Here are a couple of illustrative quotes:

“There are codes of ethics in archaeology, and I don’t think he [Indiana Jones] would be a member. Not in good standing, anyway,”

“I spent a lot of time walking in cornfields and soy bean fields in the Midwest, and nothing very dramatic ever happened while I was out looking for artifacts,” said Rose of the Archaeological Institute

“I wish he’d take more notes and things. What’s his publication record?” Zimansky said. “But I don’t think anybody ever bought the ethos of Indiana Jones as a real career track.”

The cynical side of me thinks that perhaps these guys are just trying to keep down the number of people that become adventure-archaeologists. Seriously, there are only a certain number of minotaur filled labyrinths, holy grail death temples and zombie filled pyramids. They want to keep the goodies for themselves.

I’d really like to see a whole series of articles like this on different jobs, for example astronauts could explain that a shuttle flight isn’t really like Star Wars, a zookeeper could explain that chimps are not actually as big as King Kong and a computer programmer could tell us that you don’t program computers like in the Matrix (he can see through the code, man).

Finally, probably my favourite thing about the whole article is that it lets us know that the only people who do any real archaeology in the films are actually the Nazis, and Indiana Jones kills just loads of them and steals their artifacts.

“The one thing we do worry quite a bit about is the looting aspect, because archaeological looting is really a serious issue,” Murowchick said. “This kind of glorifying of breaking into a tomb and snagging a crystal this or golden that feeds into the notion that these are valuable objects, and we should all get it while we can.”

Ok so this guide is perhaps the most important thing I have ever written, and contains information that can change pretty much any life for the better. How to dress as a robot.

Here is what you need to look like a terrifying metal killing machine:

• One big box (body)
• One small box (head)
• A lot of aluminium foil
• Packing tape
• Two CDs

The pictures should be pretty much self explanatory, just cut some holes in the boxes and wrap them in aluminium foil.

That’s it, all done! You are now (if you weren’t already) a soulless killing machine.

This particular costume was left at a friend’s house after a Halloween party. A few days later he held a second Halloween party for his 4 year old son and some of the neighbourhood children. To get the kids excited about the celebration he wore the robot suit to collect his son from nursery that afternoon. As expected the kids all loved it and freaked out. However, in the evening one of the parents arrived at the party without his daughter because she was “too scared to come, because of the robot”

Hells yeah!

I have been planing on doing this for quite some time now, but it has finally happened. [iwt] is back. Over the past couple of months I really have missed writing on the internet every day, but really wanted a break after having done so for almost two years.

Now I am refreshed, ready to resume twatting about on the internet and aware that nobody reads this page any more!

Since I have a bit of spare time today I started by replacing the horrible header image. And then cleaned up the admin side of the blog, which got seriously messy over the past two years of installing every single plugin I could find, and never bothering to delete crap that I don’t use. In doing this I stumbled over the Search Stats. Every time somebody searches for something on the blog (the box to the top right of your screen) it keeps records. Here are 50 recent searches, I have bolded my favourite search terms:

smallville, lock, sex, layered liquids, bears, “i did not draw”, research paper, research paper, draw, draw, photoshopped pictures, photoshopped pictures, the shield, deformed cat, BigDog, tiger, science projects with house hold items, advert, muscular girls, yoghurt, what american state ends with three , trailer park boys, trailer park , corn , corn flour, knox cap, fishpondbubble07, shopper discounts, shopper , 24, cornstarch balls, heroes, asimov, easyjet, hero fountain, raptor jesus, blind cat, wikipedia, wikipedia, shopperdiscount, trinity, human weapon, plot, lethal weapon, urban exploring, time , Funny Farm, podcast, map, FOOD TEST, springer, hero’s fountain, mark steel lectures, mark steel lectures, mark steel, mark steel, tremendous kitten, liquid, liquid, layers, WHICH AMERICAN STATE HAS A NAME THAT ENDS IN 3 VOW

[iwt]: Your source for information on deformed cats, tremendous kittens and muscular girls.

…come to think of it I’m going to add that into rotation for the random taglines.

Just because multiple people have complained about the creepy-ass gibbon gif having been at the top of the blog for months on end…

…[insert witty title] will return in the very near future.

The Gibbon has just become one of my favourite animals, mainly because they seem to take great delight in being absolute pricks towards other species. Check out a gibbon tormenting a dog:

I think the reason this video is so funny is that the gibbon actually looks like an ugly little human, and when he runs away with his arms flailing everywhere I can’t help but think of a mischievous little child. Second, and much more hardcore, a gibbon takes on two tigers:

Thank you Mr. Gibbon for being an absolute bastard to the other animals and really making me laugh.