Now that I've finally got around to posting something new, I just wish I could remember what it was that I was going to witter on about. OK, I'll go to my current obsession.

I'm well know for my obsession with bubblegum pop teenage female double pop acts. I don't know what it is, but for some reason a lot of my favourite music is made by cheap disposable female duos: Shampoo, Daphne and Celeste, taTu, Britney Spears... the list goes on. Well, I now have a new name to add to this roster: Halcali!

Yes, Halcali: a pair of teenage japanese girl rappers who wear boiler suits, just like the Beastie Boys, so they must be real rappers. You can click around here and find some excellent clips (30 seconds or so) from their first album, Bacon (Japanese-style random picking of English words for added coolness!).

Highlights including Guri Guri Surfer Girl (track 3). Listen to the clip of Track 4 to hear the crazy background sample ("this is a recording"). Hear echoes of several classic rap tracks including "Hey you! The Rocksteady Crew" and something else (The Message? Rappers delight? Something by Len? Cross-reference also to the "Shoyu Weenie" episode of Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law if anyone else can pick up on these references) in Candy Hearts (track 6). Wonder if the whole operation is secretly under the control of the mysterious Svengali DJ Fumiya who seems to have credits on every track. Then hear the glory of Electric Sensei (track 11), and realise that you just don't care. To get some sense of what they are singing about, then check out the translation and transcription of the current single, Guri Guri Surfrider :

It's new style How High?
koukiatsu nante chiisai
senkou faiya- maru de daiya
moeagaru sama- su-pa-saiya
sokosoko ha-do ni norikonasu ha-tobi-to
mazu ippo ri-do ABC to the Z moshi mo
norikoeru kamo ne sama-taimu

How high indeed? The album is great, so rush out and buy a copy. If you can find anywhere that sells it, that is, because I can't.

I should give mad props, or at least slightly loopy supports to Adam and Joe, whose BBC3 endeavour Adam and Joe Go Tokyo put me onto this band. Thanks guys! I wonder what's on next?



Oh, Programme Name, my favourite!

Feel free to send the above in to NTK and claim it as your own, but please don't direct people to the copy on triv: it only has 128kbps upload, and a flash crowd would probably destroy it forever (or at least get me kicked off). Cheers. Coming soon: readers letters and all new crazy search terms. Or not. Probably not.

Concepts for which we need a word: the shaking, wiggling, banging set of motions that you use when your ball-based mouse is sticking, and so motions in space are not translating to the desired motion on the screen. With luck, this term will become obsolete as soon as we (which is to say I) get optical mice. Unless they have a whole new and innovative way in which to go wrong.

I think it's fair to say that only a computer scientist would write a 'makefile' in order to invoke latex to produce all their application letters for the jobs that they are applying to. I think it's also fair to say that there's no obvious reason why I have done this, since it probably doesn't save any time overall, and if anything complicates the process and makes it slower. But, you know, anything to avoid actually doing some work or having to think about something.

I noticed today that Frosties aren't called Frosties here, they are called "Frosted Flakes". I've been eating them for the past year, and I only just noticed that. What other vital facts have I been ignoring?

Evening all.

I should point out that after the exertions of yesterday, in which I not only went to Philadelphia and back in the falling snow, but also took a quick stop off in Princeton in sub-zero temperatures. I therefore think that I am quite justified in not having left the house today. Well, there is four inches of snow blocking my egress. So, I am quite happy to stay in and slump in front of SNL.

Anyway, in response to the recent posting by angel, whose new site design makes her look like a goth, and also makes me feel sad that I fall below the line: classified as a blogger that she doesn't know; not a member of the exclusive group of bloggers that she does know. Well, OK, so technically I am a fictional character who exists only to expound the half-arsed imaginings of a semi-anonymous author who refuses to admit that this is a blog, but my point remains... increasingly obscure.

Sorry, I appear to have left a sentence in mid-lurch. Where was I? Oh yes, the fragrant Angel muttered something about having Jehovah's Witnesses (I recommend pouring boiling water over them). What I found interesting was that the Witness began the conversation with the question "Do you think people concentrate too much on material things, especially at this time of year?" That's interesting, because it reminds me of the kind of thing that telemarketers usually say when they call me up in the morning and wake me up when I am quite reasonably sleeping in because I'm lazy. They often start with something that I call, for want of something more concise, "A question to which most reasonable people would be obliged to answer yes". I remember being woken by someone representing Mothers Against Drunk Driving (I'm still looking for a group that represents the interests of drunk drivers, who I have found seem to have no one looking out for them), who called up to ask me if I thought that it was increasinagly important to think of other people, "in these difficult times". My preference in these situations is to call them on this: when someone asks a question like this, just give them the answer that they weren't expecting. Hence: Q: Do you think people concentrate too much on material things, especially at this time of year? A: No.

The other option that I have heard advocated in these situations is to convert instantly, since they also aren't expecting that. When they ask if you have welcomed Jesus into your life respond that you hadn't before, but now that they mention it, yes, super, I believe! Anyway, this is someone else's idea, and quite likely someone whose blog I read, so I will let you fill in the remainder of the details yourself.

Meanwhile: in the interestes of being too lazy to send email to people, I'll just blog this instead. I will be flying to Engerland a couple of days before Christ's 2004th, and will remain there until Uncle Sam sees fit to renew my J-1, which is always a bit of a gamble. So I'm looking for things to do to celebrate the fact that I will be dating cheques wrongly for the subsequent few months. Usually my new year's eve celebrations go pretty badly. Last years celebreation at Chez Triv was a pleasant exception to this rule. (For those not familar with triv.org.uk, think of a slightly less sinister greenend but without the universally popular SSH client). So, I thought I would offer a never to be repeated deal: I can grace your UK-based New Year's Eve party.

Here's what I bring to the table: I will bring myself and my charming alter-egos to the venue of your soiree; I will also bring some quantity of alcohol and my own sleeping arrangements. Now, I know that I will be ingreat demand, so if you want my attendance, then please fill in and return this simple questionairre:

1. Where is the location of your party?
a) In London's fashionable England
b) In the people's republic of Cambridge
c) In Coventrycestershire

2. Which adjective best describes your intended party?
a) Tame
b) Tepid
c) Lukewarm
d) Insipid

3. How is your party most likely to finish?
a) At five past midnight, with everyone sighing "Oh, *finally*"
b) Gently petering out at 2am
c) As the sun rises, the party gently dies
d) The party will never end.

...anyway, more of this later, it's time for Weekend Update.

Mmm, Tina Fey. And she is. Fey, that is. Goodnight.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: applying for jobs is very boring and time consuming. Especially considering that I haven't actually applied for any yet. I'm still working on getting everything that I need ready so that I can do it all in one blast. More or less. So far I've got my CV and supporting materials in reasonable shape, and picked out the places that I'll be applying to. But I still need to notify my referees which places to send letters of (dis)recommendation to, and write a bunch of virtually identical cover letters but make subtle differences (like the name of the place I'm applying to) to each. So some more work to do yet.

So, in the meantime, here is my discovery of the week. Stop words are the words that are thrown out by search engines as being too frequent to be meaningful: words like "the", "and", "is" and so on. So that means that the longest phrase in the works of Shakespeare [allegedly, but plausibly] is "To be or not to be, that is the". Which means that searching for these words in most search engines fail to get anything very useful. Although, searching for anything in search engines these days usually fails to get anything useful. Oh well.

While I'm on the subject, a quick google search reveals surprisingly few hits for the phrase "The Ring of the Fellowship". So, anyone who needs a title for their blue movie set in a Cambridge college need look no further. (Actually, does anyone feel like attempting to start a rumour that such a film is being made? I can't be bothered myself).

Some quick "why not try"s while I'm in the mood:

Why not try... raising the stakes?
...lowering the bar?
...bowling for Columbine?
...exceeding expectations?
...freeing the Birmingham Six?
...having a coincidental meeting?
...foiling a dastardly plot?
...extracting more energy from a system than you put in?
...staying in bed?
...being wantonly obscure?
...being wilfully obscure?
...being Jude the obscure?
...recording a new answering machine message?
...censoring yourself?
...censoring someone else?
...listening to pop?
...splitting up?
...taking the piss?
...taking the pills?
...not trying?
...keeping a web-based diary of things that happen in your life and making it publically available so that the world can read about it?
...juggling too many balls?
...mixing your metaphors?
...thinking up new insults about Jamie Oliver?
...memorising train timetables?
...getting yourself up, dusting yourself up, and starting all over again?
...writing a chapter of a book on a topic that you know a lot about?
...stopping doing that?
...applying for a job?
...pausing for thought?
...pausing for breath?
...pausing to go to the toilet?
...getting married?
...having a nice cup of tea and a sit down?

Sorry, once I get started it's hard to stop. So I'll stop.

Let me tell you something: applying for jobs is incredibly tedious. You spend the whole day messing around with your CV, covering letters, stupid requirements from different employers, and at the end of the day (literally, I'm tired now) you're no further along thn when you started. And you have nothing of interest of meaning to blog about.

So thank goodness for crap lolly stick jokes: they give us something to grimace about. Although, this one is rather familar.

Q: What can of dog can jump higher than a house can?

(OK, the original set up wasn't quite like this, but I needed to correct the grammatical errors).

Ah, that's enough for today. I'm on Internet Explorer so let's see if it manages to screw this post up.

I recently watched the Avid Merrion video for "Proper Chrimbo" which, I had been assured by that arbiter of humour, Chris Moyles, was absolutely hilarious.

I don't get it. More to the point, I don't recognise most of the celebrities in the video, let alone the impressions of them by Merrion. Does this make me incredibly out of touch, or, in some bizarre sense, does it make me cool to be above this level of cheap regional celebrity?

(If you said, "Who's Avid Merrion?", then award yourself five points and a slap on the back).

Still, it seems that the alternative for the christmas number one is a cynical cover version of "Love is All Around", which is a plot point in a film written by the guy whose earilier film first propelled the last cover version of Love is All Around to the top of the charts. Is it me, or is that just stupidly self-referential?

Can I do the joke about how this Hugh Grant thing is wearing a bit thin? You know, about how it was believable that he would marry Andie McDowell, and then dump her for Julia Roberts, but that giving her up for Martine McCutcheon is stretching it a bit? Well, let's take it as read.

Lolly stick joke: What kind of horse never wins a race?
Answer on stick: A sawhorse.
I believe that a sawhorse is some kind of construction upon which you saw pieces of wood. The concept exists in the UK as a Black and Decker Workmate, so the joke doesn't work there:

What kind of horse never wins a race?
A Black and Decker Workmate.

See what I mean? Anyway, I suppose a translation of the joke into English would render the punchline as something like:
A Clothes Horse.

Which communicates the appropriate level of crap-punness required, I think. I think it wouldn't work in America, since they don't have clothes horses in the states -- after they have worn their clothes, they just throw them away and buy new ones. More lolly stick frolics to come.

To recover my lost work from last week, I think it went something like this:


Is there a word for deciding not to email someone, but to post the message that you would have sent in a blog because you know tha thy happen to read that blog? Anyway, that's what I'm about to do, for the benefit of one of my Ivy League Professor Readers.

If you like Zero 7, then you might also like... Royksopp, whose hit Eple you should have heard either in the background music of every single Television programme shown in 2002, or else in the Soulwax megamix 2ManyDJs just after Destiny's Child has been mixed seamlessly into Dolly Parton. You should also enjoy Lemon Jelly.

Zero 7 are also of interest for their patronage of the emerging art of machinima on the video for "In the Waiting Line". Put briefly, Machinima is animation done using the graphics engines of popular video games such as Quake or Unreal to render the thing. Although, it can't be all that hip given that Wired magazine did an article on it last year, and we all know what trailers of the scarifying edge that they are.



Anyway, that's the crux of what I had to say last week, although I preferred it the way I said it originally. Damn you, Internet Explorer! Damn you to Hull!

(thought: when faced with the smug little error box that pops up in Windows 98 when something crashes advising you that "if this behaviour persists, please contact the manufacturer", how many people have actually contacted Microsoft to complain? I tried complaining to Microsoft once about an entirely different issue, and it never did me any good).

Apparently the currently Westlife song is a beatles cover (near the end).

Well, you know, Beatles, Barry Manilow -- they all sound the same to me.

Some people just have too much time on their hands.

OK, let's try this again with a host that's a little bit more understanding. At the risk of not having read the site's acceptable use policy, here goes attempt 2.

Seems like GeoCities does not like people linking to pictures... stingy gits.
Try this:

The Times [NewsCorp]
The Mirror
The Sun [NewsCorp]

Something new: pictures!

these are the newspapers featured in this week's simpsons I was going on about:

I had a very nice update written on Monday, shortly after the SIGMOD deadline, letting you know everything that's been going on - and, through a combination of Blogger's frankly vile code for IE and IE itself, the update got swallowed, and no amount of frantic hitting of the back button could restore. Anyway, I'm now safely back in the realms of Opera, which tends to be less, er, crap (can anyone seriously use Internet Explorer for anything but the most casual of searching attempts? I suppose that with the google toolbar installed it does become just about bearable, but still...)

At some point I shall try to recover the things I was wittering on about, but in the meantime, I have switched in a new tracker at the bottom of the page, since Servustats went offline, then came back apparently having been taken over by someone else and no longer doing anything useful for free. I'm trying out a new one which claims to give me search results so I can see what crazy search terms people use to get here. Sadly, the old ones seem to be lost forever, although the last time I checked, my biggest search results seemed to be coming from various permutations of "Sex bloggs" (should get some more hits from the illiterate one-handed surfers for that), and from "barbara bush nude". It's a sick world out there, best to stay inside.

Now, let's see if this works -- although this time I'll keep a copy on the clipboard unless something screws up.

Nothing much to say except the song that goes through my head every time Save My Life by Pink is played is of course Mongoloid by Devo. I know, I know, you'll all be kicking yourself too for not realising it earlier.
Many thanks to the Impact-font loving proprieter of feelgood:abd for pointing this out to me.

I should point out for anyone concerned that the two songs sound nothing alike to anyone else. It's mostly in the lyrical similarity and the pacing more than anything else. The relevant sections to compare and contrast are:

Pink:
so she... she disappeared
and she... she wasn't clear
and she... she didn't say were she was going

Devo:
and he... wore a hat
and he... had a job
and he... brought home the bacon so that no one knew

Separated at birth.

Also, that Tony Blair has been in the news a lot today. First, he shows up in the Simpsons, playing himself and generally cosying up to Murdoch [*] (it was very well done: I saw it this evening and thought it was a professional impersonator till I found out it was the real thing). Then he demonstrates a charming lack of competency by emailing a hairdresser a copy of his party conference speech.

What I find particularly cute about this whole story (and I use the word cute in its second or third meaning) is the (claimed) initial email reply of the hairdresser: "Thanks Tony, I've had a quick look and it seems fine. Go ahead".

[*] Conspiracy theorists might like to review their downloaded DivXs of the show: there are a few scenes featuring British newspapers. Simpsons being a Fox production after all, albeit a renegade one, they focus on the Times [NewsCorp], the Sun [NewsCorp] and, er, the Mirror [definitely not NewsCorp unless I missed something important]. The attention to detail is nice, tyopgraphy fans -- they even have the more recent black masthead design on the Mirror done right.

Oh, and lastly before I forget, a quick edition of "What we think in our heads vs. what we actually say".

Scene: supermarket checkout queue. Lady in front, eyeing my two frozen pizzas: "Well, we'll all be having pizza at your place tonight!".

In my head, I reply: "No, that would be weird, because I have no idea who you are."
Out loud, I reply: "Ha, yes, um..."

That is all, you may go now.

General congratulations in the direction of RaW - who, according to their website, are the best student radio station in the world, ever! Or at least, some bloke from Radio 1 says so, so it must be true.

Actually, I'm inclined to agree -- I listened to a lot of RaW last year over the interwire. In fact, you should check out the clips on trixie karinski's site: the worrying thing is I remember hearing almost all of the clips featured when they went out live! As I have been heard to mention before, Chris Carter is the future of radio broadcasting (although he will need to change his name if he ever wants to avoid all those X-Files references on the web). He deserves the "best presenter" award solely on the basis of his interview with Tim Westwood from last years awards ceremony.

What's most exciting is that they will get a chance to go live on Radio 1 for winning best station. Normally, Radio 1 is rather embarassed about the winners of the best student radio award, and does its best to lose the winning show in its schedules (the last time RaW won best station, their show went out live to the nation -- at 4am on a Tuesday morning). But this time, apparently they will get a slot on Radio 1 on Christmas Day at midnight, which is pretty decent.

For some reason, the only time that Radio 1 is ever worth listening to is over Christmas when their regular presenters are off on holiday, and there is a chance for some vaguely innovative or at least different programming. The best mix set in the world even, the awesome Soulwax 'Hang the DJ' set was broadcast at 8pm on Christmas Day in 2001, only a few weeks after the legendary Mr. Psyche set on the John Peel show. Plus of course there's the festive fifty, and even the chart of the year (when they remember to put one in the schedules -- I think they forgot last year) makes for interesting listening to hear just how undiscerning the singles buying public is.

Talking of Music, I still haven't worked out what the song Save My Life by Pink reminds me of, so please help out if you can. I got the idea that it was some punk song, so I spent a day listening to every punk song that I own, but it wasn't any of them. It could be something that I heard on the radio, which would make this harder (I can listen to every piece of music I own electronically in about a week solid listening if I am serious about it.

I also heard a song that I liked on the radio, which I successfully identified as Milkshake by Kelis (hook lyrics: "My Milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, And they're like "It's better than yours" Damn right, It's better than yours, I can teach you, but I have to charge"). Problem is, I didn't like the single mix so much, so now I have to figure out what the random radio mix I heard was, assuming even that it's commercially available. It's a hard life living in the modern world.

Anyway, I should probably actually work on my SIGMOD submissions. (current status: one I think I'm done with my part of; one has been abandoned/postponed to VLDB, and the other needs a severe amount of working doing to it asap).

Can spam deprave and corrupt you? I was just browsing the latest offerings on suprnova.org, and my eyes caught "Britney Spears - Half Naked".

In fact, what was actually written was "Britney Spears (Live and More)" on one line, and "Half Baked" on the next line. Oh well.

Thanks Brent! But really, who in Britain says "block" when they mean street?

I've been listening to the new Pink album, available from an illegal download near you now, but I'm really annoyed by one thing in particular: what is the song that "Save My Life" sounds like? You can listen to a 30 second clip here, assuming you can get real player to work. The bit that sounds particularly familiar is the chorus, which begins approximately 26 seconds into the 30 second clip, but if you have any ideas.

The album also features a nice duet with Peaches. Peaches isn't exactly on top form at the moment, but I did quite like the half-hearted ambiguity of "we are all Pink inside". Talking of peaches, a few months ago I accidentally picked up a pre-release version of the second album. I was in the ever rewarding Princeton Record Exchange, when I picked up a copy of Fatherfucker without any inlay or cover for $4 in the cheap section. I assumed that it had been out for a while, and it wasn't for a few weeks that I noticed that it still hadn't been officially released. It must have been a reviewer copy or something.

Anyway, it's a pretty good record, better than most of the reviews would have you believe. I still haven't got around to getting a proper version of The Teaches of Peaches, so I can't really compare it to the first album. But it's got some shout along tracks. I quite like several of the tracks -- Shake Your Dix has a mindless inanity of the call and response genre; I Don't Give A is a loud and shouty bastardisation of Joan Jett; and I U She is very reminiscent of the first album. Anyway, give it a try and if you don't like it, listen to the Teaches of Peaches instead.