Nixta Sinks

Oh, Norman! NORMAN!

Holy shit! Steve Irwin karked it?

Oh yeah, I forgot. I already knew that. Have been sickened by the rediculous [sic] outpourings of emotion. It's like Diana all over again. Only this chap probably will be missed for legitimate reasons. Well, OK. Conservation vs Landmines. 6 of one etc. At least the nation going nuts is miles away this time.

I found out about his death after flying back from Monaco a couple of weeks ago. Got off the plane (having got up at 3am to be driven to the airport) and as at 8:30am I stumbled drooling and witless towards baggage claim, I glanced across at a massive plasma TV and my disembodied mind was given a smackdown by the scrolling headline.

Thank you, Norm MacDonald. You've made a confused man very happy. Actually, pretty much anything that reduces John Stewart to fear and laughter works for me.

The DiCaprio Code: Stupid overfed wankers bore to death with hamfisted acting and idiotic accents to discover that irrelevant bird with nerdly bad hollywood hair is somehow 1/20,000 Baby Jebus. Who gives a sweet merciful crap? Easily in the Top 10 shit films. 5/10.

Baked out of your mind

Crazy-ass bakery. I certainly have my doubts as to whether I'd choose to get my apple danish there in the morning. Or indeed my Sachertorte. No, I think I'll still get mine from Fitzbillies (I've yet to find a Sachertorte quite as good).

It's long been a bugbear of mine that one cannot get good pastries here in the US. Like bread, it seems to be something that has just passed people by. Sure, there *are* pastries, and there *is* bread, but mostly it's inpalatable or else not a touch on the delicate tasty delights one finds in Bavaria and France, and even in Blighty (though they're normally French anyway). It took me years before I discovered a good serving of profiteroles. The concept is sound at the highest most useless level: golf-ball sized balls of pastry filled with white and covered with brown, but that's not enough! All that means is that I get a heavy pastry that takes a knife and fork to get through filled with vanilla ice-cream and covered in lashings of dark sickly chocolate. No no no no noooooo! (although apparently ice-cream does count - wouldn't you know it?). I have once had decent profiteroles in the US, but sadly I can no longer recall where. I once had great hopes for the profiteroles at an UES restaurant that The Sherman Foundation and I once visited (consuming four bottles of Dom Perignon, I believe, and ordering one of each desert), but just a poke at them with the fork had them flying back to the kitchen. Such a shame. Somehow my love for profiteroles has imbued me with a boundless enthusiasm for the next order being the real deal. Some call that stupidity.

Some call this stupidity too (thanks to Brother Tomsk for this one).

Fine Yugoslav album covers (click to see more)

You'd feel sick too

I'm normally falling foul of some illness or another. Historically, I'm known by my doctor friends (and anyone they introduce/mentioned me to) as The Hypochondriac. So in the last year I've tried to deal with it and stop being such a pussy. Cat. And so I haven't considered myself ill for quite a while now. Probably not a whole year, but surely not far off, which for me is a record.

But now I am, and just as I was successfully employing my mind-over-matter techniques that have served me so well of late, I got on a plane to New York and KABLAMMO!, there went my efforts to fight off this bastard that three weeks of non-stop overworking had allowed a look-in. Not only does airline air smell, it's dry and must be designed purely to send your sinuses into spasms. Not to mention of course its propensity for sharing lovingly between all passengers anything sneezed or coughed. I like to think I mowed down many more infants than I caught colds, and I hold that thought dear.

A quick chat with the walking google, Owen, left me in the capably sarcastic hands of The Economist to deride the airline industry. Nothing new to me, but reiterates that surely it's time to stop being so tedious about all their little rules. But since they have the rules, it leaves me with a dilemma. If you hate being on that plane just for 7 hours, imagine those poor bastard stewards and stewardesses that have to do it again very very soon, all the time putting up with your whining and endless requests and complaints about the headphones and the baby in the next aisle. No wonder they all look 20 years older than they are with that crap air and stress the whole time. But what if you hear the chap behind you talking on the phone as the pilot announces that we're not quite at the gate yet and would you please not use your phones? I believe the correct response is to ram it down his throat.

This from the Harcourt on Harcourt Street. Other gems from the visit: Swedish women don't wash their hands in the toilets. Swedish men believe everyone does, especially their women, and Swedish men are grabby and like fighting.

I've finally cracked. I've finally had it. The Doc posts about his recent trip to Greece and how it is that they're increasingly signing things in Greek and Roman alphabet. So I comment. Or I try to. Only to be told that my comment is apparently spam and to go back and edit it (though I don't have an option to do that - I only get it cleaned out and am presented with a blank comment form).

So, here's my comment (and here's the article):

It's called tourism, but for the lowest common denominator. 100,000 visitors spending £500 each brings more money than 100 spending £5000, so go get those 100,000 by sending your best entrepreneur to Britain to figure out and start a cheap way to bring those 100,000 over and in the meantime make it so that when they get there they can find their way to the nearest Irish pub where they can buy another Guinness and a diet coke for their fat close-cut kids whilst watching Sky.

Check this out to see how Yahoo and Google treat things differently. I've discussed this before at NixtaSinks. You can see that Google makes an effort, but secondary land is still labelled in the Roman alphabet.

Damned hippies.

Great photos though.

I still think it would take more than 10 minutes to learn to read that stuff, but most of those 100,000 probably don't have the attention span to even try.

This whole modern travel and tourism explosion is tragic. It's a short-sighted exploitation. Of course everyone wants to improve their lot and by taking money off morons with higher credit limits than they know what to do with, for a short time they can, but it won't be long before people won't want to visit anymore. Slovenia is already so overrun that at peak times there's nothing to visit. Nice is a shitsmeared craphole. Coloradan mountains crawl with fairweather hikers, even at 10'000 feet. Mexico is full of spring-breakers and peeping perves. I can't take a crap at our house in Slovenia without hearing 14 Brits chuffing and farting their way up the road.

Don't wait up.

P.S. I should point out that I hate computers.

Rectalgular

Plum Tits

Desperado: Simplistic purulent bullshit Mexican afternoon soap translates exactly to big screen, perpetuating derogatory hispanic stereotype without panache or flicker of hope (mix-and-match emotionballs included). Olé! 5/10

Christ, is that piece of shit 11 years old already? Robert Rodriguez should remain a fan of John Woo, not a perfunctory homage-maker. If I'd known I'd gone that long without seeing it already, I'd have skipped it. Another evening wasted. Fuck me, it's only a remake of his own fucking film anyway. Thank God that sort of BS won't be tolerated any more.

I've only just started reading The Long Tail (kindly donated by WMY, backgammoner extraordinaire), but it already gives me hope that the long-established behemoth industries responsible for such vacuous patronising excrement as the above Banderas vehicle may be on their last legs. I have long been very dismissive of Wikipedia and enjoyed a certain smugness as the various doctored articles were uncovered of late, but I concede defeat. It could just work. And I'm particularly keen to rally behind it if it's a role-model for the anti-hit-show movement that the long tail describes.

Lastly, boobs are now apparently great for selling tomatoes. This picture of the tomato van was taken right by my office. What are they trying to pull, or foist? The bird isn't even hot - certainly not hot enough to give her a 4 foot chest and plaster her across a van. These English are crazy. Their website doesn't even get into the spirit of the thing, unless that woman with the headset hasn't got any clothes on below the photo. What a stupid concept.

The TV advertisement just suggesting that I text "Fun" to 82800 pushes it home. The Brits like ugly ratfaced women.

Update: I posted the toilet photo without much explanation. I just spent a few days in Monaco, as I've mentioned elsewhere. I found to my surprise that Monacoans have square arses, and meant to use that photograph as documentary proof, but it worked better as accompaniment to my review of Desperado.

The Descent: Stupid outdoors bitches get what they asked for. 5/10

In other news, Paris Hilton's Banksy'd CD is apparently now at £250 on eBay (though it appears that auction's been pulled). But what is the internet if not somewhere you can just take hearsay and run with it? Best I can find is a buy-it-now of £675 and a flickr set.

Update: There's a video too.

The Smiiiithsonnnns

Today has been something of a hectic day for me, having dragged myself out of bed at 4:45am in Monaco (3:45am London time) to get myself and my mum out of town. We drove to find the station, courtesy of James, only for me to totally misdirect us around town, getting therejust in time to unceremoniously dump mater on her train 30 seconds before it left. Mind you, there was no ticket office open so if she had got there earlier she would have just been standing around for ages. After that, Jonky Cat dropped me off at the no-loading-nor-dropping-off Nice airport where I sat around for quite a while eating frankly disappointing pastries.

And that sums up that part of France for me. Disappointing pastries. The wedding was superb, but it was unusual. Only the best would do for the happy couple, and it was well received but I can't help but think it was somewhat beyond the ordinary experience of that part of the world. Such beauty ruined by tremendously cramped quarters wherever you went. To enjoy the Cotes D'Azur you have to be a wee bit richer than the average bear and look down from the high-rise, not up at it, and if you're not that tad wealthier then the beaches are shit and the sea is made of shit and those around you do nothing but talk shit and your picanic basket will have two-day-old mass-produced plastic-coated pain-au-chocolats in it.

But we weren't there as ordinary yokels. The wedding was extraordinary. And very very generously laid on. Luckily I had a camera to document the whole thing, and in part-two of Nixta's belated photo editing reviews, let's talk about Picasa while those photos upload to Flixta.

Since last week I have barely had 6 hours sleep a night. All to do with stressing about work, I should add. And I'm now so tired that I just can't sleep. So instead I've been familiarising myself with Google's Picasa, which until this holiday I had, for some unknown and unfathomable reason, assumed was an on-line service to rival Flickr. Instead, James pointed out that it's an offline application to rival Lightroom, whose praises I was so naively singing just a few posts ago. I'm so slow sometimes.

Lightroom is faster, slicker, and definitely more tailored to professional image lifecycles. But I'm not an image professional, so I'm going to give Picasa a go. It's free, after all, and thoroughly impressive as such. It doesn't have hierarchical collection structures of Lightroom, but it does handle movies. It doesn't have the depth of image-processing that Lightroom has, but it does have very powerful editing behind a simple interface. It's not quite as fast as Lightroom, but it's at present more reliable. It doesn't have the side-by-side compare mode or split-photo effect-editing of Lightroom, but it probably will soon. In one regard I imagine that Lightroom will continue to stay ahead of Picasa, and that's printing. Or more accurately perhaps, it'll target a different kind of printing.

My original point still remains. Apple's Aperture will have its work cut out to stay alive, especially if Google work on their Linux codebase to port Picasa to Mac OS. Lightroom has a chance in hell but both it and Picasa will probably find quite disjoint user-bases.

And so, having dozed off for a moment on my way back from Monaco, I awoke to stumble down a conveyor belt and be greeted by the saddening yet surreal news that old Croc Hunter will use his children as bait no more. I've been in that kind of mood all through my subsequent 9 hour day at the grindstone.