Personal Cinema

I was thinking about air travel and airports being boring (captive audience, everything is expensive). I had an idea- maybe you could have something a bit like an internet cafe but where you watch films. You get a computer which can serve you up films or TV shows, an armchair or sofa and some big headphones. Every show listing has a time duration next to it, so if you ahve 20 minutes you can watch Simpsons, if you have 3 hours you can watch Dr. Zhivago or some other epic. I think this would be a very interesting system. Maybe you would have to pay more to have a three-seater sofa instead of an armchair, but definitely not three times as much. Maybe there would be a minimum charge. I'm sure it's a great business proposition. I claim IP right here. Anyone want to do business?

Google-Analytics.com

When I posted just now, I noticed my browser pass through google-analytics.com. When I tried to load this page, I got a Google 404 error (i.e. not the standard one from my browser).
Whois gave the following:

Registrant: Google Inc. (DOM-1394389) 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 US

What are Google doing with my blog?!
Recently, they've been moving into indexing 'people stuff', rather than the usual 'information stuff'. Could they statistically analyse all this in some way to create a talking machine, whereby you could request information naturally from Google, as you would talk to anyone else?
Would people want this?

Update (18:30): Apparently google-analytics.com is to be the address of Google's new website traffic monitoring service, acquired as a buy-up of Urchin. The question remains as to why all blogger traffic routes through there...

"Everything in Berlin...

has this bizarrely intellectual twist to it."
- Andy

Don't breakdance on the S-bahn...

I wore this to work yesterday...

I love this German casual dress. Nothing like the British casual (secret code for a pinstripe shirt and chinos). British casual is never casual, as I would never wear that stuff at home. You end up having to buy two sets of clothes for work, instead of just a bunch of suits.

Palast der Republik to be demolished:

I thought it would never happen. The Palast der Republik is actually being demolished, starting January.

Smack in the middle of Berlin is the Schloßplatz, the site of the current Palast der Republik. In the mid 1800's, when it was fashionable to do such things, the current Kaiser demolished and re-built most of Berlin to put his Palace slap-bang in the middle. The roads all gyrate around it.

Naturally, the GDR flattened the castle, as a symbol of the bourgeois. They built the Palast. It is giant, copper coloured, uniform and fantastically ugly. It's ugliness has gone way past brutalist blandness to a cool irony, a bright 'fuck you' in the centre of Berlin. I love it. Most people hate it, some because of the ugliness, some because of the memory of the GDR.
When asbestos was found throughout, the politicians jumped on this as a great reason to knock it down. What they didn't really mention was that you have to remove asbestos before demolition, in exactly the same way as if the building was renovated, and at exactly the same cost.

The public were presented with the choice:

• Keep the Palast, or
• Rebuild the Schloß

I vote the Palast. While both ideas are retrospective, the Palast is real history, the Schloß is a folly (and expensive: at least €400,000,000). I would expect most East Berliners to want the Schloß back and erase the remnant of the GDR, and the West Berliners to be more impartial. But it is the other way around. Is this another case of the West conquering the East?

Invention: plate with shelves

I love to cook. All my favourite dishes balance contrasts, salty & sharp,
creamy & grainy, smooth & crunchy. So the worst is when everything
gets mixed together.
My plates will have three levels:

• The rim
• One half of the plate a little lower, for the crunchy stuff
• The other half of the plate lower still, for the saucy bits.

Yummy.

Male or Female

I love it when I can't decide whether someone is a man or a woman. I think it's so funny. You whisper to the person sitting next to you, and try and work it out. So I thought of an idea for a website. It would be like hot or not, but for people you see who you can't guess what sex they are. Take a picture of them with your phone, send it to us. Visitors to the site get presented with pictures and they have to guess simply MALE or FEMALE. Then they get to see roughly what other people voted, and maybe roughly how long people take to choose. Pictures which are hardest to work out become more popular.
A bit like FEMALE or SHEMALE...

"This is one of the best Saint-Emélions...

which I've had, recently"
- Pete

"I hate you...

with A PATHY!"
- Henry (ME!)

CMY Toothpaste

You need three tubes of toothpaste, one yellow, one cyan and one magenta. Not stripey or pastel coloured, but straight-up process colours.

• Put some on your toothbrush. Maybe some from one tube, and some from another. Maybe some from all three.
• Brush teeth.
• Spit any colour of the rainbow (but only one at a time).
• Would this be good for getting little ones to brush their teeth? I want some!

Toothbrush image from Daniel Fogelqvist

A hard day at work:

Can porn stars ever say "not now, darlin', I've had a 'hard' day at work"?

Much sexier than plastic porn?

These illustrations, by Gerda Wegener, are from her book 'Les Délassements d'Eros'. They are so much fun, so much more stylish than bleached blond, artificially inflated porn.
They are from the Erotic museum in Berlin, where I also saw illustrations by Louis Berthommé Saint-André from 'La Folle Journée de Gaby d'Ombreuse', some beautiful lithographs, very sexy and very French.
The Erotic Museum gave me the overwhelming feeling that:

• Sex isn't fun for girls
• Mens' brains are in their cocks

This is unfortunate, as the museum was started by 'sex-icon' Beate Uhse to dispel the taboos surrounding sex. The plastic pink decor, soft porn music and occasional cheesy waxwork are still a definite middle-aged men-in-macspuller.

A brief lesson on how the world works...

From Simonetta on Slashdot:

Let's take a time out for a brief lesson on how the world works.

• People have some money.
• People give a little of this money to lawyers.
• Lawyers give some of the money that they get to politicians.
• Politicians pass laws requiring you to give more of your money to the people who gave a little of their money to the lawyers.

A positive feedback loop. It continues to grow until:

• People kill the politicians, or
• People kill the lawyers.

This is how the world works.

Reminds me of the fabulous Assassination Politics.