peteashtondotcom

There’s a really interesting article in todays Media Guardian written by Mark Borkowski (of Borkowski PR) about how the internet is threatening the business of PR with what he calls “semantic attacks” where, rather than physically invade a computer system or unleash a virus you “exploit the interface which no firewall can defend against: the interface between humans and computers”. He uses the example of Liz Hurley where someone registered www.elizabethhurley.co.uk which took you to a cocaine ‘n’ porn site, the effects being that however spurious and blatantly false, poor old Liz is now associated with snorting lines of naked asses. Which is exactly what her PR agency is paid to prevent happening. The Hurley case is not that serious as the perpetrators merely wanted to get traffic for their porn. However, if they had wanted to attack Hurley in some way they could have used similar tactics to create a PR nightmare. His point is that the PR industry is woefully unaware of how much of this is going on and needs to wake up (so much so that he’s hired a semi-reformed hacker to work for his agency).

The subtext of his article seems to be that what was once the sole territory of the public relations guru is now open to anyone. If I want to ruin the reputation of a B-list celeb I could so with in a couple of days, and their PR agency would be none the wiser until the stories started appearing. And before you know it it’s Gillian Taylforth all over again.

As any decent human being knows, the work of the PR agency is second only to Satan’s little helpers. These guys are in trouble thanks to a medium they don’t understand because it doesn’t meet at the Groucho or follow the old boy network. If they savvy up and start using Google there are two possible implications. Firstly, the lawsuits start flying and misery follows. But Secondly, they see what’s going on outside Soho and realise the error of their ways and PR decided that Satan is a bad man they want nothing to do with. It’s a nice idea…

I can’t for the life of me find the article on the site - if anyone else has any luck please let me know.

According to The Guardian’s Smallweed column Sean Connery has been cast to play Socrates in a blockbuster movie. The mind boggles.

Today we rented a new flat. It was all very painless.

The letting agent’s name was Dave. In my experience all letting agents are called Dave.

The new flat is small but perfectly formed. It’s on the fourth floor of a new development (with swanky security gates and a lift!) and from the window you can see right across London to the post office tower. It’s in Bow in the East End right by Mile End tube station and it’s going to take me 15 minutes to get to work door to door.

We’ll be moving on Feb 24th and anyone willing to help will be rewarded with pizza and beer.

The answer comes from, of all places, the momus website on an old Thought for the Day:

‘San-X (the company which invented Tarepanda, the boneless, spineless, melting panda) has a new charactor, Kogepan, which means burnt bread. He’s cramped because he thinks ‘nobody would buy me ‘cos I’m burnt.’ He says ‘You will throw me away, won’t you?’ On his chat page he says ‘no one will come anyway’, in his link he says ‘you won’t come back, will you?’, in his BBS you’re supposed to write something negative.’

So now we know. Kogepan.

As I so often say, this is what the internet was invented for. Researching depressive burnt bread rolls.

And so, to bed…

FOUND IT!

But it’s all in Japanese so we STILL don’t know what it’s called!

However, we now think it’s something to do with bread, not poo. The brown “smell” in fact appears to be smoke after excessive baking.

Wired 7.12: Cute Inc.

This is not to say that cute is an elaborate front for girlie porn - an estimated 90 percent of Tokyo’s character designers are women, so a lot of it is about cute for cute’s sake - but designers of cute seem to have an innate sense of the titillation factor. “It’s not just being cute. There is something different - a relaxed look, powerless,” says Hikaru Suemasa, head designer at the Tokyo character-goods company San-X. Suemasa is the creator of Tarepanda (”droopy panda”), a genderless sandbag of a bear so weak that it cannot walk, but has to roll slowly from place to place (at 2.75 meters per hour, according to company literature).

“At first we worried because it doesn’t look like it’s alive,” Suemasa recalls. “But this turned out to be one of the elements that made it sell.” Earnings from Tarepanda will likely top $3 million by the end of the year. And one of San-X’s latest designs is a huddled, visibly quivering puppy with the slogan “Anoko dakewa nigatenano” (”That kid is hard to deal with”).

San-X is the copyright holder on the weird poo-thing. Closer and closer still…

One man’s beard is on fire, and another man warms his hands on it… (and about ten million others)

By the way, anyone waiting for important stuff from me, it’s been a tough week, as you can probably tell from tonight’s posts. I’ll try and get it all done on Sunday.

Okay, so now we know all about Tare Panda, which is all nice and lovely, but we still don’t know monkey-bugger about the strange poo-shaped thing on Kate’s pencil (as it were).

Tare Panda’s Characteristics
* The height is from 5cm to 3m and the skin is soft and moist.
* They do not walk or run instead they roll over at the speed of 2.75 meter per hour when they move.
* It is almost impossible to discover their distinction of sex

The smell on the landing is NOT MY FAULT. Yesterday there was a slight wiff in the air and tonight it stinks of smoke.

Thank buggery for that.

I’m not getting fucked about by spam as badly as Jez currently is (touch wood) but <DJ voice> like everyone I get my fair share </DJ voice>, most of which get’s deleted without opening.

For some reason I read through 19-Million E-Mail Addresses sent to me by my good friend tooter12c@urbis.net.il. Their list of 19 Million emails addresses for you to spam to (I wonder what kind of karmic debt pissing off 19 Millons people gets you?) is really good. They have a four point vetting system…

1. We clean and eliminate all duplicates.

Because you wouldn’t want to waste bandwidth sending out duplicate spam now, would you.

2. Next, we use a filter list of 400+ words/phrases to clean even
more. No address with inappropriate or profane wording survives!

After all, fuckmonkey@hotmail.com isn’t going to be interested in your porn site.

3. Then we use our private database of thousands of known
Internet “extremists”, those opposed to any kind of commercial
e-mail, and kicked off every one we could find.

This is my favourite. Why was I on this list? I tried to email tooter12c to let him know that I had slipped through his vetting system and that he was selling my email adress to people who were under the impression that I would not in any way be considered an extremist, but the email bounced.

4. All domains were verified to insure they’re valid.

Well, wadaya know, www.urbis.net.il works. If you’re interested in a Moldovian bride go here.

I Don’t Understand!

Okay, here’s the drill. I smoke. Sometimes I smoke in the flat, though no more than 3 or 4 of an evening. Some evenings we’re out in the pub and don’t get back until 12.00am or thereabouts.

We’ve been in this flat for 11 months. Four months into our residence a new guy moves in downstairs. Immediately after his arrival there’s the acrid small of stale smoke in the hallway. Our neighbour, who cannot stand the smell, says it’s coming into her flat and starts driving her mad. Really mad. There are discussions and arguments which eventually die down but the smell remains.

One Sunday our neighbour says she’s decided that it is me and could I please ask our landlord to fit draft excluders on our front door. I tell her we’re moving out in a month anyway but I’ll put the request forward. All very civil, like.

Here’s how the layout works. We have a front door and an internal door forming a small “porch”. We often have the bathroom window open when we’re home because of a damp problem. The bathroom is by the front door. I only ever smoke in the living room at the other end of the flat. In the summer (when all this started) we always had a window or two open in the living room.

The smell lingers on our landing (1st floor). It’s slightly noticeable in our porch and non-existent in the flat itself, implying the smell comes from outside and attempts to get in. I’ve demonstrated this to our neighbour. In the landing there are windows which have been open since this debacle began.

On Monday we were in the pub until late. When we got back (having been out of the flat for 17 hours and before that been asleep so no cigarettes smoked for 24 hours) the smell was there. I had a smoke and went to bed. On Tuesday I decided to test this myself and stopped smoking in the flat. It’s now Wednesday. No cigarettes have been smoked in our flat since midnight Monday. About 44 hours have passed.

There is NO SMELL ON THE LANDING.

I cannot see how it can be my fault. If it is my fault I’m more than prepared to accept responsibility but I cannot rationally understand it.

Why was there no smell for the first four months we were here? If the smell is being forced out by wind from our open windows to the windows on the landing, why does it stop on the landing? Especially if it’s so strong it can get through two doors (and very thick carpeting). Surely such a draft would keep going? Why does it smell so strong when I don’t actually smoke that much in the flat? Why doesn’t our flat smell so acrid, especially now in the winter when the windows aren’t open that much? And why does our flat still smell of old washing up and unwashed bodies?

I’m going to continue this experiment until Saturday morning, just on the off chance that the gentleman downstairs in away (although there were lights on tonight…). and then I’m going to concede defeat in a most confused and bewildered manner.

Can anyone with a cursory understanding of thermodynamics and wind help?

I found this special characters cheatsheet on webmonkey for Andy so he can get his European cartoonist names appearing correctly. It’s a damn useful list, as is their HTML cheatsheet. If you’re thinking of buying a £20.00 HTML book, don’t.

Just realised we own a signed first edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. That’s the pension sorted then.

I thought this kind of thing only happened to girls…

It’s probably a combination of a number of factors - very close friends announcing they’re expecting on New Years eve, me getting closer to 30 and not wanting to play the kid any more, Kate getting a career that looks like it could support us both in five or so years thus allowing me to become a househusband - but this last week I’ve been feeling kinda broody.

Those who’ve known me for a number of years might be slightly surprised to hear this but I’ve starting daydreaming about bringing up a kid.

“Good job I’m in charge of contraception” says Kate.

I mean, it’s not like the kid’ll have any problems getting hold of pornography, although Crepax’s adaptation of Venus in Furs might not go down so well in the playground…

Weird assed search engine requests continue. Let me know if you’re getting bored,,,

museum of cartoon fucking

Like, what…?

In this extract it is revealed that the paperback of Dave Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius has all the names changed and a new chapter added, so I’ll have to buy it then. Not a bad thing as I didn’t pay for my imported hardback copy.

Said extract was in the Guardian’s Weekend mag and raised many a chuckle, especially the onslaught on wankers who think “irony” is at the very least an Okay word to use in polite company. Since it’s doubtful you’ll read to the end of a very long piece I’ll cutnpaste a bunch load of it here. I’m sure Dave won’t mind.

1. When someone kids around, it does not necessarily mean he or she is being ironic. That is, when one tells a joke, in any context, it can mean, simply, that a joke is being told. Further, satire is not inherently ironic. Nor is parody. Or any kind of comedy. Irony is a very specific and not all that interesting thing, and to use the word/concept to blanket half of all contemporary cultural production - which some aged arbiters seem to be doing (particularly with regard to work made by those under a certain age) - is akin to the too-common citing of “the Midwest” as the regional impediment to all national social progress (when we all know the “Midwest” is 10 miles outside of any city). In other words, to refer to everything odd, coincidental, eerie, absurd or strangely funny as ironic is, frankly, an abomination upon the Lord. (Re that last clause: not irony, but a simple, wholesome, American-born exaggeration.)

To illustrate the many more things that are not ironic but are often referred to as such, let’s look at some sample sentences, starring a wee wayward pup known as Benji, and see if we can illuminate some distinctions.

Sample: Benji was run over by a bus. Isn’t that ironic?

No: That is not ironic. That is unfortunate, but it is not ironic.

Sample: It was a bright and sunny day when Benji was run over by a bus. Ironic, no?

Again, no: That is not irony. It is an instance of dissonance between weather and tragedy.

Sample: It is ironic that Benji was on his way to the vet when he was run over by a bus.

Still: That is not irony. That is a coincidence that might be called eerie.

Sample: It is ironic that Benji was run over on the same day he misused the word ironic.

But see: This is, again, a coincidence. It is wonderfully appropriate that he was run over on this day, deserving as he was of punishment, but it is not ironic.

2. Now, on a related subject: simply because humour is found in a context of pain, does not make that humour ironic. I have heard people claim that there is irony in the first chapter of this book, a chapter that is excruciatingly serious and straightforward. Are there even a few funny moments in this section? Absolutely not. But what confuses some people is the use of a device here or there, a formal trick or innovation that this sort of reader finds bothersome in the same way that a certain king of lore is said to have told a certain court composer that his music had too many notes.

3. If we dismiss the idea that all formal fun - and we must be allowed it - constitutes irony, then we must agree that:

5. Prefaces are not ironic.

6. Notations are not ironic.

7. Diagrams are not ironic.

8. Funny titles are not ironic.

9. Numbered points are not ironic.

10. Footnotes are not ironic*.

11. Small type is not ironic.

11a. Appendices are not ironic.

12. Having characters break out of character is not ironic.

Wait, back to humour for a second: Generally, if a joke is told, or a humorous anecdote relayed, and by chance you do not understand that joke or humorous anecdote, it does not mean it is ironic. Or “neo-ironic”. It simply means that you do not understand that joke. And that is okay. There have been a few readers who have taken the long, messy run-on of the book’s end, even that passage, as ironic. Which is so disturbing. A parody of Ulysses? What is wrong with you people?

Eggers edits the magazine McSweeneys which asks that…

If you are reviewing or writing about McSweeney’s

Use these words and phrases:

‘zine

“for the junior Harper’s set.”

small

very small

tiny

insignificant

annoying

trivial

“with subject matters ranging from murder mysteries in Indian villages
to pirate adventures and life on the moon, it’s like it’s produced by a
troop of Boy Scouts.”

precious

inconsequential

pointless

Belle epoque

“throw it across the room”

I like Dave Eggers. He appeals to my notion that the world should be viewed with curiosity from a slightly distanced but passionately involved point of view.

Rollrights Photos

More neat photos from my dad, this time of a bunch of weathered rocks. Very nice stuff indeed!

Inspired by Meg’s referral madness I thought I’d have a look at the BugPowder logs.

Some pretty good search engine requests in the last few days alone…

unsafe stupid people
beer+comics
Boris Johnson (17th on the list!)

Ah, the fun never ends!

If ducks had shoulders, I’m sure they would shrug them. There’s little else they can do.

From Andy, a great 404 Not found from a Japanese site. Big giggles!

Oh, the irony…

Railtrack’s web site is really slow and “a connection failure” keeps occuring.

Somerset Cider Brandy

We went there with my mum, sister and brother-in-law last weekend and it’s a delightful little place down a dirt track with mangy dogs, a pig in the orchard and a shedload of cider related beverages. Their cider brandy is rather nice I must say.

Neat little web resource found. Cut and Paste Scripts offers 12 advert free CGI scripts to integrate into your pages in the same way as the counter on this page (see graphic at the bottom of the page). Expect to see them played with over the next few weeks!

I think I could be an electrohippie…

In modern society the ability to communicate, organise and protest is enshrined through laws and constitutions. It is something, that at the national and international level, is considered to form the basis of a democratic society. Today, these rights do not exist in cyberspace for the peoples of many countries.

The modern Internet — once it had escaped the restrictions of the military complex — was developed as an open and collaborative system. In recent years, with the increasing emphasis on e-commerce, the Internet is becoming an increasingly ‘privatised’ public space. At the same time this corporate domination of the Internet, through bodies such as security or monitoring groups, is restricting the ability of the public to use the Internet as a medium for campaigns and lobbying. In relation to corporate lobbying especially, there is increasing resistance by those administering and policing the ‘Net to those wishing to use the Internet to “change the world”.

It is against this background that the electrohippies collective have developed since late 1999, and today are developing new ideas and tools to assist the development of the public’s right to campaign in the virtual world.

From the Church of the Subgenius…

Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 14:12:33 -0500
From: “Rev. Ivan Stang”
Subject: Our Merry Millenium “Card” 4 U

We/I hope your computer device can display this attached JPEG picture
that we made just especially for YOU!

Attached files are not permitted on this list, attachment has been removed.
–
4th Stangian Orthodox MegaFisTemple Lodge of the Wrath of Dobbs Yeti,
Resurrected
(Rev. Ivan Stang, prop.)
P.O. Box 19355, Cleveland, OH 44119 (fax 216-738-0150)
A subsidiary of:
The SubGenius Foundation, Inc. / P.O. Box 140306, Dallas, TX 75214
Dobbs-Approved Authorized Commercial Outreach of The Church of the SubGenius
SubSITE: http://www.subgenius.com

Kate and Pete

A page for our impending wedding (May 2002)