[bdj] Intimate advice from a London Call Girl — Belle de Jour is an Agony Aunt! … ‘When I was approached to be The London Line’s new agony aunt, I thought, why not? I know about agony. Reading reviews of my book was agony in itself. And my career so far has been nothing if not surrounded by questions.’

[web] Domesday 1986 — the BBC’s project to mark the 900th aniversary of the original Domesday Book now online. ‘…the BBC published its Domesday Project on a pair of twelve inch laser discs with a laserdisc player and microcomputer.’ [via Yoz]

[comics] Unintentionally Sexual Comic Book Covers … ‘I can only imagine the condition of a society in which a comic featuring wet, well-trimmed, virile young man gazing romantically in a monkey’s eyes could be published without raising some serious red flags.’

[bdj] Will the real Belle de Jour please stand up? — Jane Perrone emails Stewart Home to find out if he is Belle de Jour … Home on BdJ: ‘I’m no more interested in who Belle ‘really is’ than I am interested in who Jack The Ripper ‘really’ was. The endless speculation about the identity of such figures serves only to obscure any understanding of them.’

[comics] Katsuhiro Otomo Interview — the Onion AV Club interviews the creator of Akira … ‘I can’t create a movie by myself. It is worthy only because many staff bring new ideas and techniques. I think the appeal of being the director is to encounter such new things, which I don’t possess. It is absolutely wonderful to create something new based on teamwork. It is something that I couldn’t appreciate in my cartoonist days.’ [via linkbunnies.org]

[comics] Pleased to meet you, Reverend, your cousin is insane — on meeting a relative of Dave Sim … ‘”We’re not really in touch,” Chris said. “Is he popular?” “That’s kind of hard to answer,” I said. Your cousin is a total freakin’ genius but he’s batshit insane and did a 300-issue comic story about an aardvark with a sword crossed my mind. Thankfully, my brain had spooled back up to speed…’

[royalty] Royal Wedding Cam — Watch Charles and Camilla get hitched tomorrow.

[blogs] Bloggers Pitch Fits Over Glitches — Wired News on Bloggers recent Technical Problems … ‘Last month there was even a glitch with the Blogger status page, which prevented tech staff from posting service updates. Sometimes software glitches cause these outages. Other times it is a hardware hiccup. And when the service is just achingly slow? That’s due to a lack of power — “actual electricity, if you can believe it,” according to Biz Stone, an HTML freak who works at Google on Blogger. (He says Google is working on it.)’ [Related: Blogger Status]

[comics] Frank Miller On-Line — comprehensive list of Frank Miller / Sin City links.

[ukelection05] Alastair Campbell’s Weblog — almost certainly fake … ‘Out getting eggs for R, C and G. Couldn’t help notice Britney Spears has a perfume out. Was tempted but don’t think Fiona would be too happy. Or Tony!! He prefers Christina Aguilera.’

[bdj] The web’s Belle de Jour? — the Evening Standard proposes another suspect for BdJ — an author called Stewart Home. I’ve been sent two files of information mentioned in the Standard by verysunnymeadow (a prolific commenter on The Book Club Blog’s investigations into BdJ). Both articles are linked below:

• ‘Belle De Jour’ Identified As Male London Novelist … ‘With the Belle diary, while the forensics suggest even to the most sceptical observer that he has, at the very least, an extremely strong case to answer, the nearest I’ve heard of his making an admission is a touch on the side of the nose, given furtively to a mutual friend who was about to raise suspicions a little too high at a party.’
• Clues that Stewart Home is Belle de Jour … ‘As readers of “Belle de Jour’s” book will know, Belle mentions several male friends and lovers. However, there is one male friend who gets mentioned in the weblog but not in the book. This is “SH”, a reference to Stewart Home, the real author.’

[ukelection05] On Flickr: UK General Election 05 Photo Pool

[election05] Election 2005 — The Guardian launches another blog to cover the Election on May 5th. [Feed: Election 2005]

[london] Evening Standard Headlines — a flickr set showing how the Evening Standard’s Headline writers attempt to stamp out positive thought within the London area …


‘Transplant Patients get Rabies’

[crime] The Last Request — a Flash animation listing some of the Last Meals of Texas Death Row Inmates … About Last Request: ‘I’m by no means glorifying the men you see in this production because I honestly don’t know if they were really guilty or not. I just know that when I consider the choices they made for their final meals they were trying to tell us something.’ [via Metafilter]

[science] 13 things that do not make Sense — from the New Scientist … ‘IF YOU travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the frigid wastes beyond Pluto, you’ll see something strange. Suddenly, after passing through the Kuiper belt, a region of space teeming with icy rocks, there’s nothing. Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density of space rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seems to be a 10th planet. We’re not talking about Quaoar or Sedna: this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept the area clean of debris…’

[comics] Sin City Comic-to-Screen Comparisons — Compare Frank Miller’s comics with the upcoming Movie … ‘Not an exact match by any stretch, but the mood is there…’ [via Waxy]

[election05] Please stop calling us Tories, say Tories … ‘Though the label Tory has been used for years as a term of abuse by the left, it has never been deemed pejorative by the Tories themselves. Indeed, Conservatives have for centuries been proud to call themselves Tories.’

[film] Aliens at the Abbey Road Film Festival in London (31/3) — fancy a free ticket? Sashinka’s got some up for grabs … ‘I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.’

[ukblogs] Tories plan to beat “bias” by bringing in Bloggers … ‘The faction behind it denies that it is “rocking the boat” in the pre-election period and says that in the early weeks the website will be used to campaign for a Conservative victory. It wants people to use the increasingly popular practice of “blogging” — writing on-line diaries — to break the power of the broadcast media.’ [Related: conservativehome.com]

[unix] All The Quickies — long list of useful UNIX tips. [via delicious/unix]

[bdj] Named: the Belle de Jour of the net — The Sunday Times writes up Belle de Hypothesis and outs Lisa Hilton as Belle de Jour… She kinda, sorta denies it: ‘I am afraid I can neither confirm nor deny (involvement). I really do not want to say it is not me, because I do not want to engage to that extent. I really do not want anything to do with it. I have never read any of this woman’s writing. I know nothing about her. As far as I can see it is just tittle-tattle and coincidence.’ [Related: Belle Updated Last Night]

[comics] Steve Bell interviews Robert Crumb … ‘We live in a different world now – we got too much fun, too many distractions. I don’t believe in fun. I’m too obsessive-compulsive to have fun. Fun’s for normal people. Sometimes I look around at a party and I go, “Look at those jerks over there, actually having fun.” That’s incredible. They’re so fucking well adjusted that they’re enjoying this situation with the loud music and too many people. To me, there are so many existential factors that are so deeply disturbing about that scene that I couldn’t possibly imagine how people have fun at something like that.’ [Related: G2 in Crumbland]

[crime] Don’t fuck with Ovid — A LiveJournaller tracks down his credit card thieves. ‘…they found yet another piece of damning evidence. Credit card companies will sometimes send out “checks” that you can use to make a cash advance. One of them had one of my Visa checks in his pocket. Signed.’ [via Waxy]

[funny] Cillit Bang Remix … ‘Limescale. Rust. Ground-in Dirt.’ [Related: Another Remix]

[comics] 1000 Things to Like About Comics — another list from Tom Spurgeon … ‘…a simple list to remind us of the many ways in which the comics medium justifies and rewards our attention.’

[unix] Learn UNIX in 10 Minutes — very useful Unix cheat-sheet.

[ukblogs] Call Centre Confidential: ‘Dear Bernard, Please accept this letter as my resignation. Thanks for all your support and encouragement. Yours sincerely.’

[comics] I Married R. Crumb — interview with Aline Kominsky-Crumb. On Robert Crumb: ‘He’s been a cranky old guy since he was 25 years old. I’ve been with him for over 30 years. He was like an old man when he was young. Now he’s an old, old man. [Laughs.] Without drawing, I can’t imagine how bad he’d be. In his old age, I have to say, he’s become a lot more mellow.’

[comics] R. Crumb (at the NFT): ‘I can crosshatch like a motherfucker”