The Quickening

I have a new plugin for my side bar. It’s the countdown you see on the left. It is quite nice and easy to setup, you can get it and instrutions here. I’ve my Slovenia trip and Uxfest on it at the mo and will add Clerks 2 when its release date is announced.

Reading The (London) Times on Wednesday the 18th there was an article on the bombings recently and they kept reffering to Bombay. Now for those out of the loop Bombay was renamed in 1995 as Mumbai. So I did a search on the timesonline.co.uk, The Guardian online and RTE.ie to see what the story was with attitudes to this name change in at least those three. Would the British papers have more Bombay than Mumbai? Would the left wing Guardian use Mumbai more than the right wing Times? Well I’m not saying my methods were scientific(I just searched each site for mumbai or bombay and then Mumbai and Bombay in the same article and took this number away from the Bombay number to remove any “formerly Bombay” mentions) but here’s what I got:

I’m pretty sure I don’t like that unless those sites have a really long pre-1995 memory (and how many sites have really) it’s an indication of some kind of western malaise in my opinion. Maybe I’m blowing it out of proportion but I sure as hell know that if I was a journalist writing a piece I wouldn’t call Dun Laoghaire Kinstown or Istanbul Constantinople or any of the other renamings mentioned here. Anyway if I ever get access to Lexis Nexis I’d try the same basic search there for post 1995, just a comparison.

In the Metro some great quotes from an article about History Matters – Pass It On, a British campaign to get people interested in history:

Host: Name the funny men who once entertained kings and queens at court.
Contestant:Lepers.

Host: What was Gandhi’s first name?
Contestant:Goosey, Goosey.

Host: What happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963?.
Contestant:I don’t know, I wasn’t watching it then.

This has to be the best by far:

Host: How many kings of England have been called Henry?
Contestant:Er, well, I know there was a Henry the Eight … er, three?

They’re all from different quizs but can you guess which is from University Challenge?

Also we are going to the Great British Beer Festival on Friday now, told you she’d win.

Decided to go see :Twin Zero play in The Water Rats Theatre near Kings Cross on Wednesday. It was a bit of fun but they were only support and didn’t stick around for the headliners (Textures), full report coming soon.

Link of the day:
I’ve never seen this before, it is a Kevin Smith short for Jay Leno called The Flying Car. It features Dante & Randal from Clerks.

Later days,
Halo.