Jack Yan on Vox

From YouTube, a tribute to Mrs Slocombe’s pussy, especially since Twitter has inexplicably blocked the hashtag (while happily letting in far coarser language). Enjoy this collection, and I am unanimous in that.

Here are some of the everyday things that happen to me when using Wordpress, yet I can find no mention of these errors. Any other blogger experiencing these? I have experienced this regularly in XP and Vista, but only recently. It’s either a Wordpress bug, a PHP bug on our server, or a Firefox bug. (Of the three, Firefox has changed; the others have not, to my knowledge.)
   1. The weird link glitch. No matter what I click on, Wordpress refuses to go to that particular page. So if I clicked ‘Manage’, Wordpress clicks through to every page but the one I requested. It might go to the dashboard, the comments, or, most regularly yesterday, the create-post page.
   2. The page appearing inside random boxes glitch. For no apparent reason, entire pages load into boxes where they aren’t supposed to go. This may happen to any box on any page in Wordpress. Here is me accessing one of our blog posts at Lucire at random to demonstrate:

I stayed away from Twitter for a day and was surprised to find #MrsSlocombesPussy a trending topic. When I searched for it, however, nothing came up, and I decided it was an elaborate prank by hackers.

   It was only much later, in a Facebook comment (after I had noted that I had had a 24-hour gap between Tweets) that Kate (who used to blog here at Vox) told me of Mollie Sugden’s passing, at age 86 (odd, there was nothing on my Google News home page). Which means, of course, that I broke Twitter’s search. (Notch another one up to my brilliant skills with computer programs.) And that if I were Frank Thornton, I would be really worried.
   Farewell, Mollie.

PS.: I have just discovered that every other search works on Twitter, just not one for #MrsSlocombesPussy. The reason, says one Tweeter, is that this hashtag has been blocked. Shame on Twitter: it is either down to ignorance (they do not know the cultural impact of Are You Being Served?), xenophobia (American admins balking at British culture), disrespect (to the memory of Mollie Sugden) or dirty minds (everyone else outside Twitter HQ knows that this refers to Tiddles, Mrs Slocombe’s pet cat, and we also know the meanings of pussy, but at least in the rest of the English-speaking world, double entendres are acceptable).

Here was Saturday’s newspaper:

with Farrah Fawcett relegated to a tiny box and an inside page:    On the day she died, Farrah Fawcett, once the Charlie’s Angel who wanted the most attention, did not grab the day’s headlines. But given the privacy her family wants, I have a feeling she does not mind.

I’m firmly an officious bystander in the whole “Michael Jackson thing”: I am sad people have lost a son, a brother and a father. But since the mid-1980s I have not been a big Michael Jackson fan. His death, while premature, is not going to make me suddenly say that I adored the man and his music. I’m not one of those people who made every single item on Amazon.com’s top 10 a Michael Jackson one. I’m not going to join his MySpace page and leave a tribute.
   But I do not think he was a nonce. When the media go on about child molesters ad nauseam, I am not surprised that some accused Jackson of molestation. Paranoia alone could have seen to that. Some may have seen dollar signs and took the man for a ride. Psychologically, I don’t think the man was capable of forming the sick thoughts that pædophiles have.
   He may have paid off some of his accusers, but think of it this way: if you are a lawyer and your client has the mentality, or tantrums, of a child, what do you do? A father might encourage his son to stand for the truth and go through even a difficult experience to build his character. Someone less close, knowing the person had millions, might just advise paying up to spare a fellow human being more emotional pain than he seemed capable of handling. Michael Jackson seemed like one such person: the stresses we might choose to bear were anathema to him.
   That is, perhaps, how one should think of Jackson: a man who preferred to live some form of childhood than recognize that he had reached adulthood. In his interviews, during the legal cases, Jackson came across in words and manner as a man deeply hurt, as a child might be. Visually, however, his damaged appearance through continual plastic surgeries swayed many of us into thinking he was a monster. It is easy to be fooled by what one sees, and Jackson was the victim of his own choices in that respect.
   I am not excusing him fully. I am not going to say that Michael Jackson lacked an adult’s mental capacity. He was able to reflect on his own mortality, according to his ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley on her MySpace page. He knew what was going on, even if he chose to shield himself from it.
   But he was a deeply troubled man, with a very different perspective on life because of his experiences. He chose himself to be as defined by his eccentricities as his music. Just as with Britney Spears shaving her head, many chose to poke fun at the person rather than say that they needed to be protected and looked after. Jackson’s plastic surgeries and his strange complexion were signs, in my layman’s understanding, of someone who chose to dissociate himself from his true identity. This was not about race, as many want to paint, but about a man who never understood who he was.
   Still, I have devoted a post to him. One part of it was seeing the negative comments pages with his videos are attracting on YouTube. He did not deserve many of them. The other part is that there was a Michael Jackson, once, who was a great performer, who never divided opinion as deeply as he does today. I choose to remember hits like this one.

We all know certain computer bugs only seem to happen to me, as I have chronicled frequently. Yesterday, we had a router fault. Today, my desktop machine refused to recognize my hard drive. And now, using Twitter, I notice that the type has gone monster-large:

   This has happened twice today. I did not hit Firefox’s enlarge function (impossible to do so “accidentally” on my laptop, without a numeric keypad), which would typically enlarge the background as well. You’ll also notice that the ‘Latest’ paragraph is in the correct point size. Has Twitter been fiddling around with its stylesheet, or did I stumble across a “large type” version of the site?
   I also managed to get search.twitter.com returning 404s today as my other accomplishment. I wonder if anyone else can see this page. I cannot—but it’s a simple, routine search for an earlier Tweet of mine. It seems I managed to break Twitter Search just by using its features (feeding in keyword, username and a date range). I believe others will get a 404 with the above link, too—which I think should dispel the growing myth among my friends that I have the worst luck with computers. Use them regularly enough, and you will break websites, programs and hardware, too.
   Meanwhile, PHP in Autocade prompted me (and no one else I asked to test this) to save a page, rather than open it, at different times today (see below). (This only began happening since Firefox “upgraded” to 3.0.11.) Again, this was unique to me, on both Windows Vista and Windows XP, though I believe the fault lies with the browser: One of my Twitter friends suspects it is advertising code, which is possible, since I managed to get this page working at other times today. However, it still begs the question: why just this one page, when the coding for the CSS and other elements to the page is identical to the rest of the site? And why does Firefox not want to open a page that is encoded ‘application/opensearchdescription+xml’, which I know is compatible with it?

PS.: Fellow Tweeter Ajay reports he experiences the first error.—JY

Here is my personal transportation this weekend, courtesy of Audi. ‘Fire up the Quattro!’
   Not bad, and miles better than the A4 1·8 front-wheel-drive model I sampled last year. The power is certainly there, as is the grip, which solves two issues I had with the other B8 Audi I drove. The chassis feels very well balanced and can handle the power—something I really liked about the A5 and S5 models, which are on the same platform.

It’s not every day you have meerkats entertaining you while you have lunch. At Wellington Zoo’s Velluto Café today (they are there every day, though they are being replaced by monkeys in two months’ time).

When I think about it, many actors are not from the places we think. For example, I just blogged that Sienna Miller was born in New York. Here are some actors grouped by their birthplaces, some of which go against the public’s expectations. Try these out on a pub night quiz.

USA
Mel Gibson
Nicole Kidman
Bruce Lee
Sienna Miller
Sidney Poitier

Canada
Pamela Anderson
Anna Paquin

México
Anthony Quinn

Cuba
Daisy Fuentes
Andy Garcia

Northern Ireland
Sam Neill

Scotland
David McCallum
David Niven

England
Kim Cattrall
Bob Hope
Bruno Lawrence

Wales
Christian Bale

France
Emma Watson

Belgium
Audrey Hepburn

Germany
Martin Lawrence
Bruce Willis

Poland
Billy Wilder

Italy
Amy Adams

Greece
Tommy Lee

Lebanon
Keanu Reeves

Oman
Isla Fisher

Ukraine
Milla Jovovich
Mila Kunis

India
Michael Bates
Vivien Leigh
Spike Milligan

China
Toshiro Mifune

Japan
Joan Fontaine
Olivia de Havilland

Australia
Keisha Castle-Hughes

   On the other hand, Holly Valance, whom Wikipedia lists as New Zealand-born, was indeed born in Australia as one would expect, according to her own MySpace page. It is one of many long-standing, amateur-night Wikipedia errors that have propagated through the internet, but it is fiction.

Family Guy was cancelled once. Fox brought it back when it realized there was, in fact, a huge fan following, evidenced by the DVD sales. When the show returned, the characters specifically refer to the cancellation, with this dialogue. In some ways it expresses all that is wrong about modern television and the crap people put on. (Admittedly, there were a few acceptable shows in this bunch but the majority is awful.)

   Peter: Everybody, I’ve got bad news. We’ve been cancelled.
   Lois: Oh no! Peter, how could they do that?
   Peter: Well, unfortunately, Lois, there’s just no more room on the schedule. We’ve just got to accept the fact that Fox has to make room for terrific shows like Dark Angel, Titus, Undeclared, Action, That ’80s Show, Wonderfalls, Fastlane, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Skin, Girls’ Club, Cracking Up, The Pitts, Firefly, Get Real, FreakyLinks, Wanda at Large, Costello, The Lone Gunmen, A Minute with Stan Hooper, Normal, Ohio, Pasadena, Harsh Realm, Keen Eddie, The Street, American Embassy, Cedric the Entertainer, The Tick, Louie, and Greg the Bunny.
   Lois: Is there no hope?
   Peter: Well, I suppose if all those shows go down the tubes, we might have a shot.

I rather liked Keen Eddie and the American cop-in-Britain premise (like Brannigan and Dempsey & Makepeace). And come on, it had Sienna Miller in it as the dumb-blonde neighbour. Sienna Miller, people!
   I assume American Embassy was a US remake of the 1990s’ Australian series Embassy.
   Now, back to Sienna Miller. And for those who think she’s English, she was born in NYC. Never seems to come out in interviews though.