Holy crap.

Wow.

Hot damn.

Woah.

Well blow me down.

Fucking hell.

Sheeeee-it.

I want one.

Dark chocolate helps blood flow! I knew there was something I could use to justify eating so much of it. So red wine helps cure cancer, dark chocolate helps blood flow, and garlic just makes you feel good all over. Now I just need to justify steak, Guinness, Earl Grey tea, and jellybeans, and I’m set for life.

This one is for Kirsten.

Now picture a large man on a huge black and chrome cruiser, dressed in jeans, a slightly squirrel torn t-shirt, and only one leather glove roaring at maybe 70mph and rapidly accelerating down a quiet residential street�on one wheel and with a demonic squirrel on his back. The man and the squirrel are both screaming bloody murder.

Read on…

From Jamie of Inject comes a story in The Vancouver Sun of the city’s first deaf rave.

Everyone seems to have had a great time. There are nice touches like a lighted room so that people could have sign language conversations without the flashy light distractions, plus free earplugs for people who had full hearing.

CNN delivers this cheerful story about an enormous area of the Gulf of Mexico that is so polluted that nothing at all can live in it for several months of the year.

American farmers use nitrate-based fertiliser, which gets washed down the Mississippi river and into the gulf. Nitrates rob oxygen from the water, forcing sea creatures to move or die. These fertilisers are not unique to the US – I wonder how many other “dead zones” are lurking in the ocean.

What if dolphins created massive amounts of air pollution, killing hundreds of thousands of people? I’d be plenty pissed off.

Did I mention how cold it gets in Melbn? Apparently, Saturday was the coldest day here for 65 years. It got down to 3c, too close to zero for these people and their unheated homes.

I need to defrost. There is an aeroplane leaving at 8pm from Tullamarine (Melbn’s euphoniously-named airport) with a seat on it for me. A few hours later, the plane will land in Brisbane, and early the next day I will seek out a beach, take my Raymond Chandler novels, and sit and read for a week. I’ll break for toilet and water, but that’s it. I’m looking forward to allowing my bones to defrost a while under the Queensland sun.

So I probably won’t be writing much here for a week or so. Sorry, Michael. You’ll have to read something else over breakfast.

From PerversionTracker, who seem to have hit a publishing slump of late, comes this little gem. It’s a suite of applications that go beyond being merely useless and banal – they’re misguided, occasionally suicidal products of a severely deranged mind. I highly recommend using them. Or at least reading the readme.

A small bit of hell got decidedly frosty the other day when two former political opponents shared the same stage at a labour rally. Bill Vander Zalm, former premier of BC, shared the stage with Jim Sinclair, the president of the BC Federation of Labour. Vander Zalm wasn’t exactly best friends with the Fed when he was premier. Okay, they hated each other.

“It’s a pretty crazy province sometimes,” [Jim Sinclair] said. “Here I am at a workers’ rally with Bill Vander Zalm. That’s how crazy it is.”

The workers at the rally must have been pinching themselves as well, seeing their former nemesis apparently on their side at a rally. I suppose this is the embodiment of “the enemy of your enemy is your friend”.

This is definitely cool.

I’m not sure whether it’s because of the really good use of Flash, or the clever way it’s liking artists by styles – the way I did when I had a CD collection. There are (of course) many artists not in their database, but the ones that are there are “important” ones. Start your search with someone like Brian Eno to get some interesting results.

Once upon a time, Apple released the Newton MessagePad 100. It kinda sucked. The handwriting recognition didn’t work, it was slow, and you couldn’t really do much with it.

I had one. I liked it in spite of the shortcomings – until one day when it lost everything. Damn batteries. So I got rid of it. Later on, I bought a Palm III, which I still have.

Shortly after Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he killed off everything that wasn’t a Mac. Bye bye Newton. The sad irony is that the Newton platform had just come of age, and wasn’t sucking anymore. Behold, the Newton MessagePad 2100.

I kinda wanted one at the time, but I was happy enough with my little Palm III. Now, several years later, I want a 2100 again. I did something about it as well – I bid on one through eBay. So cheap. I know I’m going to be outbid, but at least I’m closer to one that I have been in the past. Maybe this time I’ll actually get one. It’s just lust, pure and simple. I wonder if there’s a way to do GPRS through Bluetooth with the thing?