diary

Yesterday I snuck out in the afternoon to see a documentary called Desert Wind, an unintentional comic masterpiece. Have you heard the one about the Belgian the Frenchman and the Canadian in the Desert? The plot of Desert Wind involves following 13 unlucky Frenchmen, Belgians, Canadians and Swiss as they traipse aimlessly around the Sahara Desert with their sickly looking Swiss therapist. It is presumably set outside and in the desert, since watching paint dry or grass grow would provide pretty stiff competition if you took the film seriously. For starters, the presence of the sickly man begs the question, wouldn’t a real guide rather than a metaphorical one be a less risky choice in the middle of nowhere, with no paddle? In the background are a bunch of bemused Berbers who serve as real guides but only get cameo roles on account of their lack of psychology degrees. The…

First store in Manhattan to open in Union Square in 3 months – all hail Trader Joe’s. Considering that we hired a car and spent 4 hours going to Trader Joe’s and back again, only last weekend, I am, as they say – stoked. Even better news is that they are opening a separate wine store next door to get round the stupid New York license laws which are a throwback to prohibition. Trader Joe’s to Open in New York – New York Times

The Wistslist is a metalist, a top ten of top tens. the Wistslist 2005

Not yer average gift guide: The Cribcandy holiday gift guide is up – quirky, unusual or good value gifts for around the home, with some good stuff by emerging young designers. Cribcandy – a thumbnail bookmark blog with the best stuff for your home

Oooh – I treated myself to the DVD of Scorcese’s Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, having missed it on the telly. Bob Dylan was the first person I ever saw in concert, I was 14 and someone gave me two tickets for free as I lined up outside Earls Court with my pocket money. Dylan was my current age then, and already had more than a lifetime’s worth of achievement behind him. It strikes me that Dylan’s generation, my parents’, were the children of people who had been through one of the most bestial periods in human history. Those who had experienced war, my grandparents’ generation, were ready for change and it manifested itself through their children who were brought up differently. These people created the cultural renaissance that was the latter half of the 50’s and early 60’s. Is a shame that not everyone believes that war is…

Cribcandy is today’s Yahoo pick: “A sleek catalog of nifty gadgets and hip furniture… like a Gizmodo or Engadget for Eames chair enthusiasts. You may also be looking at the future of online shopping — this site uses “wists,” or bookmarkable thumbnails, to create its constant feed of tiny images from boutiques and blogs across the Web.”

The company that Nick Denton, Angus Bankes and I started on my kitchen table in Shoreditch, in 1998, sells to Verisign – I can’t comment, but Tom Foremski has the scoop and Rafat Ali more details, including a link to a good piece on Moreover by Jason Kottke, who use to work in my team: Moreover was early on some things, news search before Google news and RSS and weblog search. The thing that we did with Evan and Meg, from Blogger, Newsblogger, was kinda cool – and we almost bought Blogger, but who knows. I have been banging on about the importance of ping servers for a while, perhaps Versign with Moreover and Weblogs.com can do something or perhaps another startup will. Whatever happens, the architecture of online publishing is changing and with it, the entire architecture of search – pinged instead of crawled. That is a very big…

Half way through Kingdom of Heaven our hero is given a choice: Marry the good king’s, beautiful, nice daughter, who he is in love with and she is in love with him, and become king of Jerusalem, rule it wisely and keep the peace. In exchange, the corrupt guy who is going out with said daughter, who is trying to provoke war and murders people periodically and who wants to murder our hero, will be arrested and executed. Sounded like a no-brainer to me. However, our hero, does not want to sell his soul, to have his enemy arrested on a trumped up charge. At this point I switched off and enjoyed the cinematography. The good king dies, the corrupt guy marries the beautiful princess and provokes a war where thousands of people die and he is captured. The hero takes over and manages to kill enough of the enemy…

The BBC have a very moving picture of an old, old man crying at a VE day remembrance service in Europe. WWII is refered to as a ‘just war’ to allude to the idea that a declaration of war can be on morally solid ground. But even if that were the case, justification is not the same as success. If 40 million deaths and many more injuries, homes lost and lives ruined and half of an entire race wiped out in genocide is not an unprecedented disaster then what the hell is? The allied victory in the Second World War was entirely Pyrrhic. For me, remembrance is second hand, of the lessons I learned from my grandparents’ generation who lived through WWI and WWII. Remembrance of a 16 year old boy with shell shock, shot for desertion to the allied refusal to bomb the railroad to Auschwitz. Because of the…

Am selling my car for the move to NY, its a 66 Mustang convertible. Mail me if you are interested! (Also using the out=plain layout parameter and forsale= metatag to experiment with using wists to create galleries of things for sale) Wists