I. Wherein I ponder the fact that the world has gone ‘effin crazy
Possibly it’s just me (not for the first time) but there’s a whole bunch of stuff happening recently that to my, albeit neurotic mind, could maybe herald the apocalypse. We’ve all become so media-saturated with our 24 hour news blogging, twittering commentary live from some bloke on a mobile at the scene, that perhaps we are inured to the crazy shit that goes on, and have missed the salient details like, the end of the world is nigh.
(yes that sentence could have done with some more punctuation, or rather other punctuation besides the blessed comma, but I don’t care.)
Possibly the gray camouflage would have been better
Ok, so maybe not armageddon, but really… a militia squad armed to the teeth wanders through Mumbai, spraying chaos wildly and taking over a couple of hotels. It’s not something you expect to happen outside of a William Gibson novel, at least, not until recently.
Add to that the fact that you can’t turn round without some natural disaster blowing up in your face, wars going on in every little corner of the globe and invading other countries becoming de rigour rather than generally frowned upon. It used to be that when you invaded another country it triggered a world war. Now we barely bat an eyelid.
Although impressed by Obama’s oratory style (and what fan of the West Wing hasn’t been waiting for the day when a President could actually deliver a speech that both made sense and made people excited?) I can’t help but harbour some vague doubts that he could very well turn out to be the antichrist. I mean, come on. Nobody is that smooth. He just popped up out of nowhere, and was miraculously nominated as the Democratic candidate over The Clinton? Then as fortune would have it, the Republicans decided to pick a walrus shooting, retard as their best choice for vice-president, backing up someone who in all probability would be unlikely to make it through the excitment of inauguration day. No. Sorry. It smacks of mind control to me.
Or collusion.
Or something.
…
Antichrist.
…
Anyhoo. Just warning you. Best stock up on bottled water and peanut butter cups…
II. Wherein I twitter and speak of pipes
Speaking of twitter, which I was earlier, go and check if you don’t believe me, I have joined the ranks of twitterers. I had an account I used for work, but have set up a personal account so I can update the world of my mindtootlings even when I can’t be arsed to open up wordpress and write something sensible. Which is most of the time.
I used twitterfeed (dot com) to feed my blog updates to twitter, then got the twitter rss feed so I could plonk an rss widget in my sidebar. WordPress (dot com) arse-achingly failing to have produced a twitter widget despite there being one squillion users now. However I was unhappy with the rss feed displaying only the date and no time, and also rather redundantly displaying my blog updates to the twitter updates on my erm, blog.
Not to be defeated, I played around with Yahoo Pipes for the first time, which are one of those scary things that I avoid because they involve complex programming jiggery pokery, whereas I am happy only doing pleasant things with html and css and images. Anyway, as is customary I found someone elses work to steal, and then proceeded to adapt it to my uses, i.e. removing the blog updates and hiding any @replies, and keeping the time in there.
If anyone wants to use the marvellous darkentries twitter pipe you can find it here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=a91386bd4a85cc29d0a484359d19f185
My twitterfeed prefix is blog update, so you’ll need to change that in the pipe to whatever you use as a prefix for your twitterfeed blog updates. Other than that, you just enter your twitter username, run the pipe, and get the resulting rss url. Slap that into an rss widget and the jobs a good’un.
None of that made any sense to most of you did it? Never mind, I am sure many confused wanderers will happen by searching for ‘twitter yahoo pipe for wordpress’ and then leave all happy and with a shiny new widget. How benevolent I am.
Anyway, soldiering on, for those of you who fiddle with such things, understand what a mashup is, and have basically not wandered off to read something else yet, Yahoo Pipes is really really cool. Which is a shame because they’ll be bankrupt within a year or so I’m sure.
Twitter Updates will live in the top right, unless I figure out a way to get them to post themselves as real posts.
November 28, 2008 at 6:28 pm |
Twitter: instant messaging without all the hassle of friends.
The Indian thing… the response to these types of emergencies in that region always feel more chaotic than the actual incident. Of all the emergency responders I don’t think I saw two guys wearing the same uniform or carrying the same weapon. I know I saw army dudes getting off their trucks wearing WW1 helmets. And it’s like everyone within ten blocks of the shootings has to become involved somehow… usually by waving their arms around and blocking traffic.
The Obama thing… his administration is turning into Clinton v3.0. I think the only person from Clinton’s 1998 administration who will not directly be on the payroll is Bill. Obama wasn’t supposed to win this time. The thing about the American system is it’s designed to prevent an anti-Christ. Everyone gets a maximum of eight years to fuck everything up, but the citizenry gets to fix their mistakes on a regular timetable.
November 28, 2008 at 6:33 pm |
Obama wasn’t supposed to win this time = he doesn’t have the people around him who could take over like Hillary had, so he has to rely almost entirely on Hillary and Bill to staff the positions.
November 28, 2008 at 11:09 pm |
Twitter: instant messaging without all the hassle of friends.
I like to think of it as yet another medium for off the cuff one liners, which the world can never have enough off. Plus, it’s a great medium for refining your prose into succinct yet witty snippets.
I blame India’s peculiarly inefficient bureaucracy entirely on colonial rule. Decades of British rule which consisted of little more than sipping G&T’s whilst watching the cricket and bellowing ‘Bloody Good Show old bean!’ has convinced the sub-continent that this is what makes good governance.
I refer you all to the fact that the British Empire now consists of 1 and 1/3 islands in a particularly cold and choppy bit of the Atlantic. We can’t govern our own socks.
Obama rules. Leave him alone you…communist.
November 29, 2008 at 12:00 am |
I think it’s a lack of trust in the government’s capability of dealing with bad stuff when it happens. People in India are just used to putting out fires without big, red shiny firetrucks showing up until it’s out or there’s nothing left but the foundation.
Obama is a communist… which makes his embrace of the Clinton’s that much more weird.
The BE left behind governments here, in America, Australia and India which have worked out pretty well. New Zealand’s pretty much a write-off though… but what can you expect from a bunch of fucking retarded hobbits.
November 29, 2008 at 12:49 am |
Did we try to rule New Zealand? I thought it was just some kind of over-sized sheep pen?
Obama may be a communist but you can’t get much done in the states without having friends in the Houses. The Clintons have the connections and Hilary has the power base.
December 1, 2008 at 8:50 am |
The real anti-Christ is only going to need (or get) three and a half years to rule. A time, and times, and half a time, right? Better you should worry about what happens on Dec 21st, 2012, the Mayan prediction thingie.
December 1, 2008 at 10:42 am |
The ‘real’ anti-christ? Do you mean we have to deal with fraudulent ones too?
As with anything in the bible, you can interpret it whichever way you like, kind of like the ramblings of another famous mad man, old nostradamus.
the Mayans had a fairly relaxed notion of what happens at the end of a cycle, being as it happens fairly frequently. We’ll probably all just grow an extra arm, or discover that religion is a bit of a waste of time, and feel faintly embarrassed.
December 2, 2008 at 4:51 am |
Nah, not fraudulent ones, I just meant people who really aren’t. I only mentioned it because I read Gabriel said that the American system was designed to prevent an anti-christ, as a Prez only gets 8 yrs to rule. 8 yrs not needed for any real anti-christ.
As for 2012, I’m preparing for a pole-shift. Best to be prepared, I say.
December 2, 2008 at 9:28 am |
I see where you’re going now…but, what if ‘time’ was taken to represent a term?