Talkin' bloggin'...

Perhaps I should go through every entry and delete the expletives - tomorrow morning (at around 11.10am) I appear on Radio Humberside to talk about blogging and, who knows, maybe some of the nice listeners will come along and pay the blog a visit.

The taking of photographs and videography by the public in Hull's wind tunnel-cum-shopping mall St Stephen's has been banned on the advice of Humberside Police, on the grounds that such happy snapping could all pose a terrorist threat. You'd think that terrorists might work in a slightly more sophisticated manner than whipping out their low-res Motorolas, maybe choosing instead to look at widely available plans and elevations such as these or the ridiculous amount of images that have already been taken before planning their bombing campaigns. Apparently, photography will be allowed if the photographer in question has 'legitimate reasons'. Ask yourself "why do you take photographs?" and I'll bet the answers you come up with, for the most part, sound a bit silly and not in the least 'legitimate'. Yes, St Stephen's is private property and they can do whatever they want, but life just gets dafter, eh?

Reading: Yukio Mishima - Spring Snow

Virtual terrorism...

It was from his bedroom down an ordinary road lined with trees and randomly 'laid' with dog faeces and on a laptop that Mr Killing Time set up a website to build a network of extreme half-wits. In the space of just a few years, or many months, as interweb users prefer to call the passage of time when they're not expressing their opinions in binary, Mr Killing Time 007, as he became known, was the king, and occasionally the queen, of cyber stupidity. When an international team of intelligence experts who had never actually been online descended on Mr Killing Time, they found him plotting to log off and go and have a cup of coffee. For several more years, forensic experts viewed the thousands of files on Mr Killing Time's computer equipment, finding dozens of half written plays, several jpgs of Agyness Deyn and Kate Moss and an mp3 of Goon Show clips. The evidence against Mr Killing Time is so underwhelming that he now intends to set up a central hub for terrorists.

Is it just me, or does all this Younis Tsouli business seem a bit, well, daft? I suppose it's more the John Craven's Newsround-style patronising coverage that makes Terrorist 007's crimes seem about as serious as an afternoon updating your profile on Facebook while sitting in the same office as the boss. "The number of websites doubles by the day," a Newsnight reporter has just told me. Well, as long as a good half of them contain funny .avi files of skateboard accidents I really don't object.

In more serious news, and back on a Facebook tip, Facebook has been asked to remove the rather addictive Scrabulous by Hasbro and Mattel, who are quite rightly keen to protect their copyright of Scrabble, which the popular electronic Facebook version rips off lock, stock and triple word count. Bit of a silly thing to do, really, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, eh? But Scrabulous was a bloody good way to pass a few hours.