Recently in the Links Category

I'm dead tired (but, clearly, not exhausted) after Software Freedom Day Singapore 2009 (which I will blog about at my leisure, unfortunately for you), but I really do want to keep up my blogging rate - I'm still averaging a post a day since I started this whole better-blog-regular-like thing on Monday, and it seems a shame to give that up - especially with all the help Remember The Milk is giving me in this area! - so I figure I'll bring you some funnies.

I love comedy with a passion unequalled by any of my other interests (and if you have any idea how many "interests" I have, this will have astounded you). I enjoy a lovely belly laugh as much as the next person, basically rely on the BBC's Friday Night Comedy podcast to get my through overlong days and stressful times, and read webcomics I like with vengences. I'll dissect comedy to get at the bones of the thing, with meat still hanging loosely on. I'll revere people I consider to be comedy geniuses, such as Messrs Milligan, Hamilton and Hardy, as well as brilliant comedic performers, including Peter "Bluebottle" Sellers, Mark "Mr. Cul-de-sac" Steel, Jon "Brian Perkins and The Doctor" Culshaw, Fred "It's Fred" MacAulay and the entire cast of I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue and The Now Show. And what an uncomfortably long list that is already. Check them out on Wikipedia - or even better, YouTube. They really are incredibly brilliant.

Reminiscing (to say nothing of mass Wikipedia-ing) aside, here's the links I really wanted to share on this blog post: some of the funniest gags I've seen on the interwebs recently.

• I'm Not Entirely Sure He Knows What That Is by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins.
• Tangled Webs And So Forth by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins.
• Parable of the Good Samaritan, as read by Police Constable Seargent by Spike Milligan.
• The Unhorse by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins.
• And Here's Gabe With The Weather by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins.
• The Mark Steel Lectures: Oliver Cromwell by Mark Steel and team.
• A clip from A Dog's Life by Charlie Chaplin, also starring Sydney Chaplin and a dog. Movie details available at IMDb.
• The Mark Steel Lectures: Charlie Chaplin by Mark Steel and team.

Well, that took longer than I thought, but my list of things-to-blog-about is now a whole lot smaller. Hooray, etc! I'll see you tomorrow.

I recently stumbled upon a brilliant website called The Diary of Samuel Pepys. In case you're not familiar with the gentleman I refer to in the title of this post, he was a naval administrator and MP in his time who rubbed shoulders with Newton (him of gravity and mechanics), was an early president of the Royal Society, but remains best known for the detailed diary he maintained for nine years from 1660 to 1669 (he was also played by Neddie Seagoon in a Goon Show episode entitled The Flea, but that's quite another thing entirely).

I'm fascinated by the potential historical significance of blogs - I don't suppose I'll ever be famous, but it'll be fantastic to tell my family, "Hey, want to know what I was doing from 2003 to 2009? It's all on the Internet!". How cool is that? That's a lot of writing from a fast-growing-much-grousing part of my life, so it'll be quite interesting to myself eventually, sitting somewhere in the twilight of my years looking back on myself (I reflect so much I feel like a opposing pair of mirrors sometimes). Reading my old blog posts is already a pleasure I indulge occasionally. My Twitter feed is also accumulating the nail-clipper-droppings of my daily life - nothing of any use to me now, or even in the near future, but wouldn't it be awesome to look back on my life in, say, October 2009, with the kind of almost creepy near-hourly perspective that Twitter allows for? And remember how much I enjoyed just being able to find a double-decker bus to or from work?

Samuel Pepys is, to my mind, that principle stretched to its ultimate conclusion. He was a skilled writer and journalist, and was in the centre of the tumult of his times - if you'd been reading blog since September, you'd have read his wonderful description of his experience of the Great Fire of London, 1666. The blog is true-to-date, too: entries are put up exactly 343 years after they occured. Too busy to follow the complete journal? Snippets of his life are of course available on Mr. Pepys' Twitter feed.

Another reason this website dazzles and astounds me is how well this potentially bland, text-only information is organized. I haven't had a chance to read the encyclopedic articles (I only believe in one encyclopedia, anyway), but the in-text annotations, the Also on this day summaries of local weather conditions and other journals, and fantastically cross-referenced names (such as Mr. Thomas Hayter) really bring the text to life. My current unformed impression of information science is that it consists entirely of people sitting around figuring out the best way of presenting, say, a large amount of text-only content, in a way that would be fun to look at and work with, attractive to new readers, and clean and useful to existing readers. Information like this deserves to be made available in a form like this website, which does justice to what I like to think (romantically, I know) would have been a goal of its writer.

Doing something like that for a living would be completely awesome.

The best webcomics are well-drawn and interesting. The greatest webcomics are emotional and meaningful. The very best webcomics somehow manage to draw you into the lives of (physically) two-dimension characters and breath so much life into them, you can feel your gut wrenching in sympathy with these illusionary fragments you meet three times a week. This page from The Order of the Stick is about all the evidence I need that Rich Burlew is insanely talented, and that OotS is pretty much the high-water-mark of what online webcomics can accomplish.

Check out this news story on YouTube: the guy who (might have) tried to hold up a bar containing twenty off-duty police officers. I saw this on This is True (a fine publication, by the way), and had to go track the surveillance video down. Basically a guy ran into a bar wearing a bandana and holding a hand in his clothes, as if he was hiding a gun. He rushed in right behind two off duty police officers, part of a group of four. He was confronted and quickly tackled by the off-duty cops, who - their beers still in their hand - forced him onto the ground and kept him there until an on-duty officer arrived and arrested him for disorderly conduct.

A funny story, I think, although I wish the media wouldn't assume that someone arrested (not even tried, as I write this!) for disorderly behavior was actually planning on robbing a bar. Luckily, wiser heads are prevailing: according to a local paper, Eau Claire Police Chief Jerry Matysik is planning to "look at that to determine if they acted professionally and properly". So I guess we can all laugh a little easier.

(Do I overanalyse things? I guess I do, but for me a joke has to be perfect. Not good, not great - perfect. High standards, I guess.)