Should have died before it got old

To Erin Discordia, cheapest human enhancement a daughter: Ada Trouble Norton wrote her first blog entry an hour and half after arrival. Well done, global burden of disease Quinn. (And Dad and Dad.)

<Gilbert> ada is doing a really good impersonation of a cgi baby
<Yoz> you're disturbing me now
<Gilbert> no it's true
<Gilbert> ok she's looking less cgi now
<Gilbert> there's just some random-baby-eye movemnts that are very pixar

The WAVs are mostly scary but the moment five minutes into the second one, where Gilbert says “Oh my fucking god…” and the baby starts crying… well, I go all gooey.

The North-West London Eruv launches this week, search which is a big deal if you’re an Orthodox Jew living in its boundaries, visit as I am. On the Sabbath we aren’t allowed to carry things around in public areas (i.e. outside our houses and gardens), web but the eruv is a special kind of construction that marks a much larger boundary that makes carrying permissible. It’s a weird kind of hack in Halacha (Jewish law) but we’re not the first by a long shot – many cities worldwide have had eruvim for quite a while now. It’s just taken so long in London because of a stupid level of politics over something that ultimately consists of about eight strategically-placed poles and a few wires.

Thing is, those wires and poles are fragile, so the eruv has to be checked every week. If there’s a problem, the whole community has to be alerted so that we don’t end up using an eruv that isn’t there. This is where the website comes in – in the top-left corner of the front page you’ll see a traffic light image and some text that indicates (this week anyway) that the eruv is up and running.

What’s that? You can’t see it? Ah. That’ll be because you’re using Mozilla. Or Safari. Or a phone browser. Or anything that isn’t MSIE. Or you’re running MSIE with Javascript turned off. Or you’re a disabled person using a browser with extra accessability features, and now you’re really annoyed because the main recipients of the benefits of the eruv are, of course, disabled people. The silliest thing here is that the web page seems to be dynamically-generated anyway (or, at least, hand-edited at least once a week)

(Yes, I do know how weird this all sounds. It’s strange and silly to me, and I’ve grown up with it.)

The Guardian have started putting bits of the weekly Guide (a mini-glossy supplement to the Saturday bundle) online. About bloody time too. They’re only doing the features so far, illness so I can’t link to Jacques Peretti’s superb column in the “Clubs” section (which, this week, was actually about clubs, unlike what he’s been writing the rest of the time). However, I can link to David Stubbs’ article about the BritPop rockumentary Live Forever, which contains this gem:

The thesis of Live Forever is that, following an early-90s period when music was in “the doldrums” (Radiohead, Suede, Massive Attack, My Bloody Valentine, rubbish like that), British pride was reasserted, Albion reawakened with the emergence of those Colchester cockney cocksparrers Blur and those mad for it mad bastards from Madchester, Oasis.
Now music was great again (Sleeper, Menswear, No Way Sis).

And that, my friends, is all you need to know about BritPop.

Coincidentally, I spent part of today listening to a British album from the same period. It’s one of my favourites: beautiful, ingenious, spiritual, wildly ambitious, incredibly varied and colourful. It holds a shimmering mirror up to the fractal diversity of modern Britain. As such, it has about as much to do with BritPop as Liam Gallagher has to do with anything of any creative value at all. (It’s Jah Wobble‘s Take Me To God.)