nocto

the guardian’s list of 52 american advantages is a bit dubious. not only are many of them not particularly widespread in america but several of them don’t seem to be advantages at all.

• thirty year mortgages: so you can pay the bank tons more interest for a miniscule reduction in the monthly payment over a standard uk 25 year term? it makes far better economic sense to pay your mortgage off over the least time that you can comfortably manage rather than the most.
• fierce loyalty to illogical fahrenheit, mileage, gallon and pound avoirdupois measurement. oh please. the americans got to the moon first despite the impediment of imperial measurements not because of it. and find me any american scientist who’s not familiar with si units and all the ease that working in powers of ten in easily converted between units gives us.
• yellow, lined pads and yellow, eraser-head pencils. are yellow pads actually made with unbleached environmentally friendly recycled paper? if they are i’ll concede the point but i can find plenty of pencils with rubbers on the end here too. they don’t mention the stupid non iso sizes the pads come in. (oh yes they do, that’s another point i disagree with)
• free local calls from residential phones over a really small call area with sky high rates for national and international calls. my penny a minute local call area covers most of the population of the north east of england.
• supermarket baggers – courteous youngsters who expertly pack your purchases at the checkout while you fumble with your wallet. i make that doddery pensioners who pack heavy tins on top of squishy things, haven’t heard of putting all the frozen stuff and all the refrigerated stuff in their own bags and often pack just two or three items to a carrier leaving you with a multitude of bags to carry.
• high-school graduation, and regular class reunions as if friends reunited wasn’t quite scary enough
• unambiguous, literal (not symbolic) traffic-control signs: “don’t walk!”, “wrong way!”, “slow!”. internationalisation be damned.

i could stay here all day but i think it’s a good thing that the uk has left many of these things behind or implemented them better.

shhhhhhhhhh, i’m being verrrrry quiet because i gave up taking dumb personality tests. you haven’t seen me. i couldn’t resist finding out that if i were a corporate mascot i’d be the penguin penguin though. dead right too. i’m off to look over a few orange book spines. [i was led astray by sore eyes]

eBay item 1677522500 (Ends 23-Dec-01 17:19:52 GMT ) – Buy an Entrepreneur Wife [as reported on the register]

clever little bookmarklets make your browsing life easier. this directory doesn’t seem to include versions of these very useful validation bookmarklets for checking if pages are valid html and css though.

exquisite corpses are simply gorgeous: take a look at this one or this one or this one or this one or, oh just go and browse yourself they’ve taken the folded over paper people party game and removed the people and the paper and just kept the folding over bit. i want to play! [found via not.so.soft]

i’ve just realised the subtext behind the “blip blip blip bleeep bleeeep blip blip blip” that my nokia phone shouts out when i receive a text message. it’s sms in morse code. i’m both impressed with it not being a random beeping and unimpressed that it’s taken me about three years of being beeped at to figure out the hidden meaning.

the new euro notes will be the same across all the countries involved. despite their blandness they could have been a lot worse — imagine if notes were all the same size, all green and had no interesting distinguishing features… the coins however are not all the same. each country will have its own designs on the backs of its coins though you’ll be able to take coins from one country to another. i wonder how long it’ll take to get them all muddled up? what’s odd is that some countries didn’t bother thinking up a different design for each coin. whilst the austrians had no trouble covering their coins in different pictures covering everything from mozart to alpine primroses, the irish went for harps with everything and luxembourg just stuck the king on. i have a feeling that when us britons get to join in the euro fun we’ll get stuck with the queen’s head too rather than anything interesting.

i discovered the word metalepsis in a book today. it meant mixing up the direction of cause and effect. this is something that causes me to grind my teeth, stomp and rage everytime i read about a survey that proves something in a decidedly backwards way. in the book i was reading the protagonist’s toddler daughter thought her cough was caused by cough medicine. you take the medicine when you have a cough, hence coughs are caused by cough medicine. sounds silly? not if you’re a journalist faced with statistics aparrently.

but the dictionary doesn’t bear out the definition. which is a pity because i really need to know the word for this concept.

google have magicked up lots more of the usenet archives. they now go back twenty years. oh, to think that i once thought i was posting on an ephemeral medium…. cringe. [found via sore eyes]