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Shaggy Blog Stories book cover

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.

In: WWW / Links

2003 / 12 / 05 – 16:18 Top


forget making your own mr potatohead — make yourself your very own mr picassohead.

abstract dvd a la picasso

In: WWW / Links

2003 / 12 / 05 – 15:14 Top


steve of weyoftheweb and his ‘jacket potato and baby gravy’ post has just made my day.

In: WWW / Links

2003 / 11 / 21 – 12:46 | Comment [1]Top


the control arms million faces petition: anyone recognise face #6164? [ignore the sunday morning bedhead.]

In: WWW / Links

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.

In: WWW / Links & TV News

2003 / 10 / 06 – 00:02 Top


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.

In: WWW / Links

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!

In: WWW / Links

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.]

In: WWW / Links

2003 / 09 / 04 – 09:44 Top


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:

What I have created is a personal networking site that uses pop culture as a way of matching people. You enter your favourite album, movie and book and it finds the people that have the most similar tastes to you. It doesn’t cost anything to use and you can see the site here

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

In: WWW / Links

2003 / 09 / 03 – 11:25 | Comment [1]Top


blimey, google’s getting cleverer. it isn’t just about the best search engine out there — it now does sums. in a simple case, a google-search for ‘2+2’ doesn’t throw up a list of pages that contain the phrase ‘2+2’; instead,…

Read the rest of “smarter searching”…

2003 / 08 / 13 – 11:41 | Comment [6]Top


i’d like to present two awards this evening. the first goes to the best demonstration that knowing css code does not necessarily make a sensible design. yellow on blue is bad, but blue on blue? *gibber* the second is the…

Read the rest of “another friday night award ceremony”…

2003 / 07 / 25 – 20:29 | Comment [3]Top


i was pointed to www.fudland.com by a friend who had a spot of trouble finding my site — wha…?…

Read the rest of “what a difference a d makes”…

2003 / 07 / 17 – 22:49 | Comment [5]Top


depending on who you ask, the internet is shit or the internet is not shit. i’ve got to side with the latter opinion myself; the internet is such a fundamental part of my daily life that i’d be fairly masochistic…

Read the rest of “the internet is\isn’t shit”…

2003 / 07 / 07 – 08:40 | Comment [5]Top


there’s nothing like reading about a good bit of inutile scientific research being carried out by someone else to drag you out of a bout of fuddblues. possibly in response to the clear need to assist some beginners in the…

Read the rest of “more tea, dvd?”…

2003 / 06 / 25 – 15:28 Top


there’s a cool new utility for bloggers who don’t have ‘trackback-enabled’ blogs — such as blogger-hosted blogs for example. ben and mena trott, developers of movable type and the trackback system, have written a beginner’s guide to trackback for a…

Read the rest of “now [almost] everyone can trackback”…

2003 / 06 / 17 – 17:25 | Comment [5]Top


i wonder how many people have genuinely been taken in by my credit card details? i love this bit in the faqs: Will my details be seen by everyone? Absolutely! Your details can be seen as soon as you register,…

Read the rest of “can i take your number?”…

2003 / 05 / 26 – 14:30 Top


whilst trying to figure out the best way to get from neasden to enfield yesterday — and i mean ‘best’ in the sense of ‘easiest’ rather than ‘quickest’ or ‘most pubs’ — i discovered the brilliant transport for london journey…

Read the rest of “getting around”…

2003 / 05 / 14 – 10:25 Top


the guardian very thoughtfully gave away a great freebie yesterday: a dvd containing a high-quality version of honda’s ‘cog’ ad [you may remembering me wondering if it contained cgi], together with a ‘making of’ documentary, a flash-powered guide to each…

Read the rest of “cogitation”…

2003 / 05 / 11 – 17:49 | Comment [2]Top


play.com selling ‘transformers: the movie’ for four and a half quid!…

Read the rest of “reason to be cheerful”…

2003 / 05 / 08 – 22:18 | Comment [5]Top


it’s been a while since i linked to any news stories, and i’m starting to get withdrawal symptoms, so here are my two favourite stories from the last couple of days: i love it when old, thought-lost, recordings are found,…

Read the rest of “extra! extra! blog all about it!”…

2003 / 05 / 08 – 21:54 Top


go check out the recently redesignaged comovedy, now in minty fresh mt flavour — look at those navblocks pop in and out! cooooooooool….

Read the rest of “as promised, he delivers”…

2003 / 04 / 16 – 01:54 | Comment [1]Top


as noted and linked-to by a great many people now, the new honda ad is way cool. however, i have a nagging suspicion that it’s computer generated — i really don’t want it to be, but at some points the…

Read the rest of “i was just hondaing”…

2003 / 04 / 12 – 15:24 | Comment [2]Top


i still can’t see the april fool story in today’s guardian [if they did one], but this bbc news online story has to be one. for my own part, i believe i successfully fooled rob for a couple of seconds…

Read the rest of “more fool you”…

2003 / 04 / 01 – 13:48 | Comment [4]Top


comic relief night has begun — to make an online donation, click here. what kind of cheese is made backwards ? edam!…

Read the rest of “this is where the fun starts”…

2003 / 03 / 14 – 19:00 | Comment [1]Top


comic relief, registered charity 326568 today is comic relief’s red nose day, which means lots of crazy antics throughout the country, all in the excellent good cause of raising flipping great wodges of cash for people who genuinely need…

Read the rest of “funny ha ha”…

2003 / 03 / 14 – 00:00 | Comment [42]Top


i’ve been listening to mull historical society’s new album loads lately, so they have the honour of being the second entry in the ‘dvd listens’ archives. the name ‘mull historical society’ raises the following grammatical question in my mind: given…

Read the rest of “blog rocking beats”…

2003 / 03 / 13 – 22:07 | Comment [4]Top


ooooo, mrtn you tease! get on with the rest of it! [and then finish getting your website together.]…

Read the rest of “on the verge”…

2003 / 03 / 07 – 00:09 | Comment [2]Top


via but she’s a girl…, i find to my delight that ‘the office’ is going down a treat in north america — well, one guy* likes it at least! and he likes eddie and ‘black books’ too, so his comedic…

Read the rest of “funny taste”…

2003 / 02 / 22 – 01:35 | Comment [8]Top


kind of following on from that last post, this demonstrates both some of the amazing achievements of human understanding, and also that you don’t need to understand something to be captivated. [via idle type, via nicely toasted.]…

Read the rest of “powers of 10”…

2003 / 01 / 31 – 16:52 Top


i’ve just been admiring the night photos of troy paiva at lost in america [via but she’s a girl…] — they really look amazing, especially when you consider there’s no post-developing manipulation going on. all the photos are taken using…

Read the rest of “by the light of the silvery moon”…

2003 / 01 / 28 – 16:19 Top


so, tell me: who would swap my wife for theirs uk london surrey? other questions: jd + coke + already consumed bottle of wine. who’s ready to chat the night away?…

Read the rest of “qotd”…

2003 / 01 / 24 – 00:20 | Comment [3]Top


sobering thoughts? try worldometers. scary stuff, and we’re only twenty-one days into the year. [link via nicely toasted.]…

Read the rest of “tick tock”…

2003 / 01 / 21 – 23:42 Top


the price of beer is going up by about 10p a pint. bastards!…

Read the rest of “time to switch to spirits”…

2003 / 01 / 17 – 13:55 | Comment [2]Top


someone has worked out the equation of happiness — excuse whilst i exhibit a classic case of british cynicism. [i suppose you should check out the article first.] a couple of things struck me as i read about it: firstly,…

Read the rest of “happiness where are you?”…

2003 / 01 / 06 – 12:51 | Comment [1]Top


this might be a little after the fact, but i still have to point out the ridiculousness of this site. in particular, this part from the faqs: ‘the movie is intentionally being named “the two towers” in order to capitalize…

Read the rest of “protest the protest”…

2003 / 01 / 05 – 02:50 Top


now you can mumble your way through uninspiring dirge in the location of your choice, thanks to the inflatable church. note the purchase or rental option — who’s going to need one regularly enough to buy one?…

Read the rest of “inflatable vicar costs extra”…

2003 / 01 / 04 – 22:21 Top


congrats to my dvd retailer of choice, play.com for making it into yahoo’s picks of 2002 — i vote they give away loads of movies to celebrate!…

Read the rest of “well done play.com”…

2003 / 01 / 04 – 16:03 Top


…just write, here. it’s no good me trying to clear my mind before starting this kind of thing, because when i try to do that, i always — always — think of the stay-puft marshmallow man….

Read the rest of “don’t think…”…

2002 / 12 / 29 – 00:59 Top