Waffle

Last Friday, I bought a can of cheap Red Bull knockoff. I put it in the studio freezer, intending to chill it for an hour or so, and promptly forgot about it. Ten minutes ago, I took it out again. It was frozen solid. I managed to pull the ring pull tab open a bit, and put it in the sink to thaw out a bit. It is now sitting in the sink, humming ominously. Will it explode in a cloud of sugary, carbonated stickyness? Or will the slight release of the tiny opening I made be enough to keep the pressure down?

I've had some experiences with accidentally frozen beer, enough to tell you that freeze-distilling it in the bottle doesn't work. The beer had lost all its taste. But things might go very differently with an aluminum can full of high-pressure carbonated water. I may have accidentally invented a deadly weapon! With extra froth! It will be my contribution to Mad Science for 2005.

A repeat performance from Andrew Rilstone in which he demolishes another "PC Brigade" story, taking off with the headline

"Yes, it's hard to believe, but now Santa AND Christmas lights have been banned."

. Upon closer examination, the actual story turns out to be

Local council doesn't ban the word Christmas from light switching on festivities at all.

AND

Town moves Santa five minutes round the corner

. Again, read it. And next time you come across a story like the one he dissects, or a second-hand report of same, engage maximum skepticism. You may want to blogroll Andrew's blog as well - he doesn't post much but when he does it's always great stuff.

Update: See this story at Media Watch Watch. It gets a bit confusing because that website was set up to counter an organisation called Media Watch and in this post links approvingly to Australian Mediawatch but once you've got the sourcing figured out, it's another good example of a non-story being turned into a story by means of Making Shit Up. It's about a report that British banks were "banning" piggy banks for fear they might offend Muslims. The reality: banks haven't been big on porcelain porcines for some time.

I've had a Dutch edition of Maigret et son Mort by Georges Simenon in the house for almost two years, on loan from Jeroen (the lesson here is: do not lend me books), but hadn't got around to reading it until this weekend. Now that I've read it, I'd like to read some more Maigret. This one lived up to the series' reputation as literate, literary detective novels.

What I liked: the fact that throughout the first half of the novel, the characters took every opportunity to have a drink. Even a five-minute interruption in a stakeout and pursuit was used by the pursuer to knock back a nice cool one. The descriptions of the police work in which Maigret's individual brilliance solved part of the puzzle but the rest of it had to be filled in by relying on reports from other departments and off-the-record chats with minor underworld characters. This made it feel a lot more like real police work than the stylised version we get in detective novels where one person solves crimes alone.

I also liked the switch from fairly light-hearted to grim after the second killing. At that point, the boozing and puzzle-solving is superceded by mass raids and escalating accounts of the depravity of the criminals involved. There's a dark view of human nature contained in the novel - one in which tidy notions that a crime has to have a motive are given short shrift.

But let's not get too Gallic in my praise of the book. It's still a cop novel, not an existentialist magnum opus. It's a few hours spent in the company of the Inspector, his wife and his mates down the station. I'll have some more of that - but lending me the books is probably still a bad idea.

Fear.

For a guy who writes about music a lot, I don't have many music links on my blogroll. This is more of a historical accident than anything else; when I started blogging, I looked around for other blogs about music, and it turned out that many of the interesting ones were done by people who were desperately unhappy, clinging to music for the emotional support needed to make their lives worth living, but unable to lift themselves out of misery. I am convinced that music has that power to sustain people and even to turn lives around, but you couldnt' tell from the ones that I had taken an interest in that it was more than a refuge to them. They made for such painful reading that I had to stop following them to avoid getting sucked in. I assumed that that was what music blogging was like - just like political blogging encourages people to become shriller and more partisan over time, music blogging, I thought, kept its bloggers treading water emotionally.

That Girl Needs Therapy doesn't give off that vibe at all. I stumbled upon it repeatedly through Technorati and the last time I did it had a nice comment about my blog in a post, plus author Tatgoddess posts many interesting mp3s for her readers to sample. I will be checking out Nouvelle Vague on the basis of their cover of PIL's "This is Not a Love Song" (the original of which I initially hated until I acquired a taste for John Lydon's singing) , for example. TGNTL is now on my blogroll.

Speaking of John Lydon, he's got a nice interview in the Dutch magazine Oor, December issue, in which he mentions that he doesn't hate Pink Floyd actually, talks about how childhood meningitis affected him and comes across as a moderate, easy-going sort of guy. Who'd have thunk it?

After two years, I've updated the Full list of my available online comics work. The problem, though, is that it probably isn't complete. After 8 years (not counting the first online run of ROCR which had vanished by the time I started on my bart.nl homepage again), I've lost track of which comics have been posted where. If you know of a Reinder Dijkhuis webcomic not listed here, don't hesitate to email me. You'd be surprised by my ability to forget stuff like that. I've removed some comics from the list that have disappeared, like the autobiographical story "Herman" which will return shortly as the first non-ROCR comic to be uploaded into WillowCMS.

I have also added a new author's bio. I hate writing those things but you got to have them. I'll even get a publicity photograph there some time, to scare people away from reading that page. Yeah, that'll work.

So today we've got the original version of the first page of "Alcydia" up on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen website, and it turns out that nobody is more surprised than Geir, who emails:

Oy! You've actually got the missing first page of "Alcydia"!

Daniel redrew that one because he'd lost the original. I still think the first version is best, actually.

I think the new version is pretty good, but you'll have to wait until January to see it. I do wonder if Page 22 was redrawn for the same reason though... the original to that was really good. See it in a day or two.

It's becoming a bit hard to keep track of things, so this entry is mostly for my own benefit: I'm working on four additions to the website in WillowCMS: 1. A new Cast section. This would be the fourth version of the Cast section. All images on the index come from the database entries for the individual pages, so the index will build itself. 2. A Guest Comics section. The old guest fourtnights and any other guest material that already exists will be kept rigorously separate from the main archive. Future guest comics will run as new chapters in the main archive hierarchy but will be moved to the guest comics section when the normal run resumes. Not that I'm planning to have a new guest event in the near future; they're a bit high-maintenance for my tastes. They demand new bling on a regular basis otherwise they get all catty and threaten to withhold sex. 3. An Archive Listing page. This is the most urgent, because there's already a big ol' button on each page pointing to "Archive" that doesn't work. 4. Full-chapter pages for fast browsing. Example

For all four additions, the status is that they're unfinished and that they need me to improve my understanding of WillowCMS (or at least get good documentation to copy/paste from), completely revamp the HTML code, have Mithandir fix the latest bugs in WillowCMS and/or do a lot of fixing in the database before they're ready for prime time. I only mention them now to show that WillowCMS can indeed do them, and to help me remember to work on them.

(more...)

After three months of continuous updates, we're taking a break from regular comicry over at Chronicles of the Witch Queen. We'll be updating, though, with sketches, previews, Odds and Ends. Because no Webcomicsnation website is complete without a behind-the-scenes feature.

You may have heard of the scandal over Sony Music's crippling of several of its CDs with rootkit software (essentially, a powerful Trojan Horse that will get installed on your Windows PC if you autorun the CD). The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an article up with an explanation of why the technology is damaging to your PC, a list of CDs known to be infected and a quick tutorial on how to recognise possibly-infected CDs. There's a second article discussing the 3000-word End User License Agreement (I love the word "Agreement" in this context. You "agree" by unwrapping the CD, and thanks to the good people in the computing industry, we no longer even notice how Orwellian that is) that comes with those CDs, and how it compares with the rights CD buyers have traditionally had.

The US edition of the latest Kate Bush album does not have the rootkit, but based on how Sony treats its customers I would advise American fans to import the album from Europe or Canada. EMI, who still release Kate's work in those territories, are no saints in this regard either, but I believe they've already learned the hard way that this sort of thing is Just Not On.

(Via Jon Mandle at Crooked Timber)

Update: Listeners in the Netherlands take note. According to an article in Webwereld, Sony still wants to roll out the rootkit technology on CDs released in the Netherlands. You may want to start boycotting them now, just to be sure.