Adventures of Mr Coo, a wacky bit of Flash animation from Basque-land. (Cited by JoAnne Schmitz.)
At Languagehat, some interesting brief remarks on the Belgian aristocracy’s efforts to seem less alien to Flanders.
Warren Meyer on why libertarians write blogs (cited by Arnold Kling)
Most (according to casual sample) of the comic strips hosted at Keenspace have had their archives disappear, in whole or in part, this week; as if Keenspace had been taken over by Blogspot.
This week I saw a sudden decline in two kinds of spam: comment spam on this here blog, and referral spam in my HTTP log. I have not done anything recently to improve filtering.
Yesterday I received in change an Irish €.02, whose resemblance (in size and color) to US $.01 is striking.
Three Ealing comedies recently became available that I had long wanted to see. Evidently I’m not alone: I waited several weeks for these on Netflix. Alas that the sound on these discs is not as clear as one might hope.
Passport to Pimlico (dir. Henry Cornelius). The next-to-last unexploded bomb left over from the Blitz goes off, revealing a cache of treasure and a royal charter declaring that the neighborhood is sovereign territory of the duchy of Burgundy. Soon the street is swarming with black-marketers and shoppers rejoicing at a loophole in wartime rationing (which was not lifted until 1951 if memory serves). Naturally the Government surround Burgundy with Customs and passport inspectors. The Burgundians retaliate by stopping a train with their own inspectors . . .
Whisky Galore! (dir. Alexander Mackendrick, who later directed The Ladykillers). During the war, an island in the Hebrides runs out of whisky and all is gloom – until a ship carrying fifty thousand cases for export hits a rock nearby. Hijinks ensue. — Gordon Jackson, whom you may remember from Upstairs Downstairs (Hudson the butler) or The Great Escape, here is baby-faced at 25. He had one of those faces that proclaim even in black-and-white that the bearer must have red hair. — Small spoiler: This is the only Ealing film I’ve seen in which lawbreakers (cheating the taxman) get away with it.
A Run For Your Money (dir. Charles Frend). Two Welsh brothers win a prize for their coal-mining excellence: a trip to London, £200 and tickets to a football championship match — but they miss their contact at Paddington and have misadventures. The comedy is low-key by today’s standards.
Every few days I check my HTTP log to see who has linked to me. (It is entertaining sometimes too to see what search keywords led here.) The pleasure of that little chore has long been tainted by spammers; I guess it was December or so when I stopped making a note of the sources of such bogus referrals.
This week, something new and puzzling: referrals ostensibly from two hundred other WordPress blog pages – some of them two years old – that contain neither any reference to ogre.nu nor any conspicuous link to gambling, sex-pills or spamming services.
Some clown is using my address to spam everyone@amherst.edu with what appears to be an account of the bombing of Dresden. Why??