“Falling Out of Cars”, a new book by Jeff Noon, and a “Vurt” screenplay!

A Vurt fan-comic

Vurt Feathers for your pleasures

Noonian Blog

Feathered Up On The Muppet Side!

Jeff Noon on the death of the Vurt-Manchester locations. I’ve got mixed feeling about the New Manchester changes - there was something almost romantic about the urban decay, but that didn’t make living in it easier.

“If you look at The Smiths and Joy Division, you’ve got a light and dark thing going on there, a reflection of what was going on in the city at the time. Whereas, with the new Manchester thing, the ‘New Manchester’ people, they’re trying to pave over the darkness.”

Someone commenting on my ignorance of the genre: “You are a bit… disco-dim…”

I know enough, just enough. Knowing too much is dangerous.

It’s increasingly likely that I will end my time in this world buried beneath a collapsed stack of O’Reilly books.

Link: Professor trapped for Easter under pile of books

I’ve wanted to visit Orkney ever since I was about 6 and saw a school TV programme about ancient villages buried under sand, despite the programme being rather spooky. I think the programme was a dramatisation of Skara Brae’s history.

This is a great site, full of folklore and history.

Link: Orkneyjar

Yet another stupid law appears on the horizon and threatens to make me a criminal for protecting my privacy and property with decent software. Thanks to Linux.org.uk for highlighting this.

If this law passes I can get two to ten years in prison for wearing one of my t-shirts through customs. Prison for wearing a shirt with a small Perl program on it.

On a professional level, this law would make systems administration even more legally difficult than it is now: email = export. I could go to prison for doing my job properly.

Where are these proposals coming from? MPs are usually utterly clueless regarding technology issues, which means they’ll vote for laws like these, but I doubt that they spend any time worrying about these issues. Does the DTI really want to generate more work for itself chasing silly crimes like using ? The similarity between many of the new IT regulations proposed and passed in the UK and laws proposed and passed in the USA is remarkable. The USA’s encryption laws were proposed by the FBI, NSA and CIA, and they focus on opening up communication for evesdropping by government agencies.

It’s as if the government was banning door and window locks, curtains and bank PIN numbers in order to aid its security services. Do we want a panopticon?

If you live in the UK, please contact your MP and complain about this stupidity. If you don’t live in the UK, try to avoid this happening in your country so the sensible people in the US and UK have somewhere to move to :-)

“The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it’s the same picture, of some person walking out of some building with a vase.” - Rumsfeld

Big vase.

Link: Nero in Baghdad

Good news for water voles.

It’s strange and sad that things like water voles and sparrows might become extinct - they were once such normal, everyday things. I’m not at all sure about blaming mink for the decrease in water vole populations. I think that it’s more likely to be the fault of industrial farming, just as it is with sparrows.

Link: Hi-tech voles find new homes

• An interesting guide to art representing Japanese gods and deities

• Because a plain, normal cat isn’t good enough for some people

• Because a plain, normal hotel isn’t good enough for some people

• Because a plai- argh, please tell me this isn’t true, it’s even worse than TV here.

If true, this was a quite remarkable invention - a train that was supported by single wheels, like a bicycle, but balanced by gyroscopes.

Link: Transportation and the Gyroscope

• Chocolate
• Sex
• Flowers

Even with stormy weather approaching, the air here smells lovely - there’s a breeze blowing in from the sea, and the smell of new plants and sea air mixed together is very pleasant. Birds are singing, leaves are covering the trees again. Ah.