Fuddland
Long-time readers of Fuddland might be aware that I tend to support Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day whenever it comes around. In the past this has been in the form of sponsored commenting, donating an amount to the charity based on the number of comments I receive on Red Nose Day.
This year, due to living in a foreign country and suffering complications of bank accounts and general relative skintness, I decided on a different tactic to show my support: I waited until someone else had a genius idea, and then proceeded to wheedle my way into it.
Thus, I’d like to wholeheartedly recommend to any, all and more of you reading this to make one, several or indeed nine purchases of Shaggy Blog Stories.
A collection of 100 short humorous pieces from the UK blogosphere. All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the Comic Relief charity. Contributors include Richard Herring, Andrew Collins (BBC 6Music), Emma Kennedy, James Henry (TV’s “Green Wing”), Abby Lee (Girl With A One-Track Mind), Catherine Sanderson (Petite Anglaise), Zoe McCarthy (My Boyfriend Is A Twat), novelist David Belbin, Anna Pickard (The Guardian), and a diverse selection of some of the UK’s most talented bloggers.
Should that list of well-known names not be enough to encourage a purchase, then perhaps the tingly news that the sixty-fourth contribution to be found within its pages is from this very weblog. In the interests of intrigue, I’ll not be telling you which of the 1,656 [including this one] entries I’ve written over the last almost-five years it is. [Oh okay, one clue: it’s not the one you’re reading now. That narrows it down a bit.]
For full details of all the contributors, and more of the story behind its creation, I’ll point you in the direction of the book’s brainparent and masterminder, Mike Troubled Diva. I’m chuffed to bits to have made the final cut, but even if I hadn’t, I’d still be pimping this book like … I’m sorry, I’m just far too English to finish that sentence. Just go and buy it, and I’m sure you’ll be chuckling at at least 99 of the stories.
In: Indexed & WWW / Links & No Category
2007 / 03 / 16 – 12:33 | Comment [4] | Top
i’ve just found out my old coursemate and the woman who first told me about actuarial work [damn her!] has been keeping a weblog as she travels around south america. follow anna’s travels, currently somewhere in brazil.
forget making your own mr potatohead — make yourself your very own mr picassohead.
steve of weyoftheweb and his ‘jacket potato and baby gravy’ post has just made my day.
2003 / 11 / 21 – 12:46 | Comment [1] | Top
the control arms million faces petition: anyone recognise face #6164? [ignore the sunday morning bedhead.]
2003 / 10 / 26 – 13:59 | Comment [1] | Top
i admit it: i watched derren brown play russian roulette live on television and i spent the last ten minutes of the show standing up because i was too nervous to sit down.
as our man at the beeb notes, the first part of the show — the whittling down of 12,000 applicants to be the one person who puts the bullet in the gun — was quite fascinating; the games brown had devised were simple but [thankfully, in the end] effective.
did he always know it was chamber number one, and pretend he messed up by firing chamber five into the air, for added tension? it certainly looked like he was nervous after his apparent misjudgment, but who knows?
i’m not the first to say it, i won’t be the last, but here it is anyway: derren brown’s just pissed all over blaine’s strawberries.
oh, and it’s always good to have an excuse to remind people of the darwin award winner who played russian roulette with a semi-automatic pistol.
the puzzleblog numbers game just became a whole lot less fun due to one of the google ads that support the site linking to the countdown numbers game solver.
in the comments to my previous entry about puzzleblog we touched briefly on the possibilities of making a computer algorithm which finds the answer through exhaustive searches; mrtn and myself talked about this further, artificial intelligence being suggested as a way to avoid a lot of the dead-end calculations.
i’ve no idea how this particular routine works, but judging from william tunstall-pedoe’s cv he may well be the cleverest man in the universe, so it’s bound to be fairly nifty coding — ranking solutions by ‘intuitiveness’ and problems by difficulty. shame it doesn’t appear to be open source, i’d have liked to have a look under the hood.
2003 / 10 / 03 – 15:46 | Comment [3] | Top
a great idea for a weblog, and [i think] powered by typepad, is puzzleblog — every day two new puzzles are posted, one scrabble based, the other is like the numbers game from countdown. good for a few minutes of brain-wracking distraction.
speaking of countdown, its afternoon-quiz companion is fifteen-to-one, and as i write my mother is sitting in their studios as a stand-in in case one of the other contestants falls ill or doesn’t turn up; this privilege is a result of being a winner on a previous show — let’s hope she gets a chance to shine again. go mum!
2003 / 09 / 18 – 14:57 | Comment [5] | Top
any time i moan about being a poor student and how i can’t afford to save up for nice new things, or take lavish holidays, or get onto the first step on the property ladder, remind me about the global rich list and how, at this moment in time, i’m still in the top ten percent of earners worldwide; ninety percent of the world’s population earn less money than me. obviously you’ve got to take into account relative costs of living, but it’s good to have a little simplified perspective thrust in front of you once in a while.
[via tom coates and quite a few others.]
this is a plug [socket, plug, geddit? *ahem*] for a new website called popmates, created by a chap called andy knight. andy sent me, along with a few other people [scaryduck, phil price] that i know about, an email asking if we’d mind linking to his site — it was created as part of his masters degree, but he’d like it to get it off the ground beyond his degree.
not one to deprive a fellow student of trying to claw their way out of debt, i’ve obliged his request [after checking it wasn’t some cunning new form of spam, of course — although i was fairly sure it wasn’t spam since it came through my contact form and actually used the name dvd a few times in the text, rather than something generic]. here’s the lowdown, from his email:
http://www.popmates.co.uk
It also has this other feature whereby if you post a profile it allows you to create a connection between your profile and other people’s - you can create a network of friends and friends of friends. That way you don’t just have to search through random profiles to find people you can also browse through your mates networks to see what their friends are like. You can see an example profile here
http://www.popmates.co.uk/test/project/profileDisplay.jsp?username=andy
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