In light of today’s blasts, people in London that I know are ok:
all Ozsvalds/Wadsworths, all Brooms, Eve/Marc, Niamh, Angela, Jo, Ed Patient, Rob Hansen
Duncan Jauncey/Vicky, Hector Maclean

Go vote for your favourite kitty. You get a choice of two kittens, pick one and his ranking goes up. The other, goes down. Iraiza-the-cute is the current winner, whilst this poor ugly wretch is somewhere near the bottom.

‘Winningest’ kittens here. Sourced via PeterBe.

The European Parliament on Wednesday rejected a proposed law to create a single way of patenting software across the European Union, a blow to big companies who had pushed hard for its adoption.

Woohoo! Quote from here, original link here. And we won the 2012 Olympic bid. We rock!

Don’t ever buy a Motorola V600. Or a Motorola anything. This is undisputedly the worst mobile I have owned. Every two months it forgets that I’ve asked it not to sing whenever I touch the keyboard, and two months is just long enough for me to forget how to silence the darned thing. Nokia – I’m sorry, I shall never desert thee again.

Two months to the free upgrade. I’m counting the days.

Whilst watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind I got curious about the alien’s landing zone at the Devil’s Tower (Wyoming). I found a beautiful overhead shot via Google Maps. If you zoom right in and pan a little left you’ll see the visitor centre – the maps are so detailed you can even make out the cars. There’s also a nice map at the University of Texas’ library site.

Oh heck, I’m not going to say much about this – Spielberg does it again. Aliens turned up a million years ago and buried giant killing robots underground. We missed them and built cities over them. They sit in space and watch us for years then zap pilots down into the robots so they can mince humans and make us into fertilizer.

SPOILER ALERT: If the aliens have been watching us for ages, why didn’t they watch the 1953 original and remember to wear encounter suits, lest they succumb to the same ‘flu as the others? Silly aliens.

Still, it’s a much better film than A.I. and the flaming train was a moment of genius. But the ending? Oh, so Minority Report. Thumbs neutral, I guess.

[Edit - John points out that the technical term for a thumbs-neutral is 'meh']

ShardCore has been interviewed,

When I see the work from UK cult artist Shardcore, I know that these pieces represent more than just the images at face value. There’s something else in play. His mixed media work features pop culture icons juxtapozed with vibrant paint strokes.