Rik Abel

Flying Dog vs Metal Cat

I often lie awake at night, wondering to myself - "who would win a fight out of a flying dog and a metal cat?" Let the jury decide:

FLYING DOG

METAL CAT

So, who wins? Cast your vote via the magic of comments!

Squirrels on Crack

Squirrels on Crack
Originally uploaded by Deadbeat Dad.

I love the 'how a squirrel might look nibbling on a rock of crack' callout.

Our Disco Podcasts

My favourite night out - And Did We Mention Our Disco? - which happens every Friday at my favourite tiny underground club with a killer soundsystem, cheap beer and lovely, cosmopolitan clientele - Plastic People in London's fashionable Shoreditch - is now doing Podcasts, which is nice. iTunes users, click this link and subscribe. What kind of music, you ask? Well, to quote the website, you can expect "the freshest sounds in town: punk, funk, no wave, rock and roll, fucked up house, sleazy electro or mutant disco." You betcha! Nice one, Den.

YouTube

YouTube is awesome. It's, like, Flickr, for video! That is to say, for non-geeks, it is a social-tagging enabled video sharing and hosting website. So you can upload a video you have made (or just have lying around...) and then you and others can tag it with meaningful words. Which is really great. I mean, I know I want to see as many videos of people krumping in their bedrooms as I can. You too, no? No? Okay, well search for whatever you DO want to see, chances are you'll find something there that takes your fancy, all of humanity is on there. Or will be soon.

Until that happy day, my colleague recommends the Family Guy Ipecac clip. It's unbelievably icky and funny. Don't watch if projectile vomiting doesn't amuse you at some (incredibly puerile) level. It's easy to even embed videos in your blog post, like this:

Wow, eh?

Word to the wise

Overheard recently in the Soul Tree club in Cambridge, from one of those West African guys who set up a little hand-towel and After Shave/Cologne concession in the toilet of nightclubs, as he liberally sprayed a slightly bemused punter pretty much from head to toe:

"Have some Joop! De punani love de Joop!"

So now you know.

Mini Me Machine

So I had this brilliant idea on the train this morning. Really, it's brilliant. You may be aware that you can now get your body 3D-scanned at a walk-in booth - I think Levi's had a concession at Selfridges or somewhere for custom-fitting jeans. I figure that this means these scanners can't be THAT expensive to rent. So what you do is, you hook up one of these scanners to a 3D printing machine, as are now definitely commercially available. You see where I'm going with this? Within minutes you can have an accurate, scale model replica of yourself! In durable ABS plastic! How cool is that? It's very cool, that's how cool it is. All it needs is a name. MiniMe immediately springs to mind, but may not be usable seeing as Mike Myers thought of it first. Any other suggestions?

A number of scenarios immediately spring to mind as to why you might want scale model replicas of yourself, and why it would be good:

• you can give one to your partner so that they can always have a small plastic version of you. You could even do a keyring-sized version, sort of like Qees. These could me called KEY-MEs, maybe?
• (Part of the fun would be customising your MiniMe, that is to say painting the white plastic ABS with model paints, or something. Some geeky people seem to enjoy that sort of thing, the type of people who play miniature war games maybe, but it could catch on...)
• you could have a series of MiniMes made over the course of your lifetime and then create a depressing diorama of your inevitable decline on your mantelpiece. Sort of like that evolution-of-man sequence, only backwards. And 3D.
• It would hopefully lead to the demise of Madame Tussauds and their scary waxworks, which all too often fall slap bang in the middle of 'uncanny valley'.
• There may well be medical applications. Maybe they (doctors and clever scientists) are already fabrication perfectly fitting artificial hip joints (say) by doing full-body scans with an fMRI machine (or whatever is cutting edge these days) and then printing the files for your bones. Wow, eh? Why not make a backup of yourself while you are healthy then you can print out whatever you want. A model of your spleen? Why not! Who cares if it is useful.
• If you've got enough cash and when the printers get big enough you can do a full-size version of yourself. Or loads of them for a mad and slightly worrying terracotta army of you. Meanwhile with the current size printers I imagine you could still create a full size version of you by just printing out a bunch of slices and then sticking them all together.
• the plastic surgery applications are pretty exciting - scan your head, tweak it with 3D software, print out an ideal version of you for evaluation. Or print your head and fix it to a hunting trophy style plaque and fix it to your living room wall
• How about scanning a bunch of famous footballers for a custom table football table? That would be sweet.
• I could go on, but you get the drift...

I'm sure there are myriad other applications, sensible and ludicrous. This is a winner, eh? Feel free to offer other ideas. I'm not sure how the economics work out - I'd imagine the scanning machine hire ain't THAT cheap - and you'd have to physically go to a booth and get scanned, which cuts down on the maximum throughput, but surely the technology will get smaller and cheaper. I wonder what the Dragon's Den people would think?

Go Dana!

In a friends-and-relative are star authors (or going to be) type double whammy, massive (and somewhat belated) congratulations to my dear sister-in-law Dana whose Science Fantasy novel The Steam Magnate, which will be published in September by Aio Publishing. Being ridiculously talented, Dana is also doing the cover art and illustrations. You also go, girl!

GO Ali!

Huge congratulations to our friend Ali Smith, who has won the Whitbread Novel Of The Year award, beating out such nonentities as Salman Rushdie and Nick Hornby, with her novel 'The Accidental'. I suppose you'll be wanting that website now, eh? That'll be £5k. Joke!

Fish'N'Chips'N'Goths'N'Gravy

We spent New Year's up in Whitby, North Yorkshire. Two things should be known about Whitby  - it has the bestest Fish'N'Chips in the country (according to Rick Stein, at the Magpie Cafe, we tried them, and lo, they were good. Cooked in lard, you see?), and one of the highest per capita Goth populations in all the world. The reason for the latter is that this is where Dracula came ashore (as a rat) in the book. Luckily, Whitby has managed to avoid a terrible excess of Draculiana - just one tacky concession which features Christopher Lee's "Eight Stone Cloak" (wtf?) and has retained its charm as a moderately "delightful" fishing port (although the fishing industry has been devastated due to, well, there being no fish left in the North Sea). Oh, and it is really chock full of fat people. Maybe this is not unrelated to the legendary and aforementioned fish'n'chips. Whitby St Mary's Church (by the famous Abbey) is one of the weirder churches I've ever been in, but all I can remember about it is something about a previous vicar having a deaf wife who listened to his sermons via gutta-percha ear trumpets. How random.

We also visited Robin Hood's Bay, which is MASSIVELY cute/twee (in a good way). The beach on New Year's day rivalled Oxford Street for the amount of foot traffic, but had more dogs (including a Shiba Inu, my current favourite breed) and seaweed and rockpools and fewer men holding 'Golf Sale' signs. Which can only be a good thing.

Well done, then, the North East. Having visited this region I've pretty much "done" England now, with the possible exception of Herefordshire. But who cares about Herefordshire? There's nothing there, is there?

My New Year's Resolutions...

I'm telling you all these in the vain, misguided belief that it might actually make it incrementally more likely that I hold to at least a few of them. I'm a sucker for resolutions, me. Anyway, my resolutions are, in no particular order:

• start doing astanga yoga again
• start doing Aikido
• meditate
• blog regularly (no really)
• start a video blog
• work hard and help to make Headshift social software uberlords (we are already, but hey...)
• become a worldclass CSS-ninja
• read a book a week
• cook two meals a week
• learn to DJ (on my powerbook)
• start a new blog about inline skating
• write a short story
• stop swearing
• keep in better contact with friends and family
• spread positivity and happy vibes
• live a more eco-conscious lifestyle
• be as creative as possible
• don't be mental
• go dancing once a week
• visit slovenia in the summer
• stop making stupid lists