‘I’ve written tens of thousands of words; I’ve made hundreds of new web-friends; I get around 400 emails a day. I have to say I’ve never enjoyed myself as much as a journalist, had as much impact with my writing, or had as much sheer fun as a commentator on things large and small.’

‘Whatever else it is, [webloging] isn’t much of a business model. I pay my mortgage by writing for the old media – for this beloved paper, for the New Republic magazine, for Time, and other outlets that do the old-fashioned thing and provide remuneration for work. And yet, for all its economic dysfunction, the new medium has never been as powerful as it is today. In fact, I wonder if there’s ever been a technological innovation that has combined such extraordinary new power with such dramatically poor financial rewards.’

‘LinkMachineGo, what kind of a man are you? “Don’t hurt me,” says LinkMachineGo. Well, duh. LinkMachineGo, what kind of a man are you? It must be obvious to anyone who can think that the charges against the dirty bomber are true. When will LinkMachineGo come clean about the way he criticizes Ann Coulter? Instead of constructing arguments based on logic, the hot-tubbers assume that whatever they want to be true must be. “‘Department of Homeland Security?’ What the fuck is this, Brazil?” says LinkMachineGo. LinkMachineGo’s disgrace was obsessive and even dangerous. It was ad-hominem. It was ideological. But I understate.’

• Cory Doctorow’s Sad Mac Tattoo … ‘The sad Mac icon, taken from the ROM of his MacSE/30 (inset), measures 27 pixels square.’ [via Aprendiz de todo]
• Read Comics in Public — another comics weblog. [via Bugpowder]
• What is LMG? ‘LMG is a video recorder that jams mobile phone frequencies, crushes ice and never gets tired.’ [via Lukelog]
• The Quiet Man Speaks — Steve Bell on Iain Duncan Smith.
• Comment from Sri Chinmoy supporter regarding the Sri Chinmoy Project … ‘When I look at this curious confrontation between weblog culture and yoga culture in cyberspace, in reminds me of a Star Trek episode. Aliens from planet Chinmoy are flooding the ship’s computers with poetry for some unknown purpose. At first this is seen as a potential threat (such as a DoS attack); but by the end of the episode we discover that the “aliens” are humanoid, and that they are in fact a peace-loving race who simply choose a different way of life. They are sending out vast quantities of poetry because this is their instinctive way of defending themselves against attacks by Vogon-like anticultists.’ [Related: Original Post]

Frank Miller: ‘I don’t think so.’

Stan Lee: ‘Well, let me put it this way… [Pauses.] No, I’m not going to try to be clever. I really don’t know. I just don’t know.’

Alan Moore: ‘[Laughs.] Well, I can’t move for them, quite frankly. I’m looking at about 12 of them from where I’m sitting at the moment. I’m kind of swamped for choice. Yeah, there’s probably tons of them. There’s probably a swarm of gods.’

‘CAMERON (grim monotone): 1958 Ferrari 250 GTS California. Less than a hundred were made. It has a market value of $265,000. My father spent three years restoring it. It is joy, it is his love, it is his passion.

FERRIS: It is his fault he didn’t lock the garage.

CAMERON: Ferris, my father loves this car more than life itself. We can’t take it out.

FERRIS: A man with priorities so far out of whack doesn’t deserve such a fine automobile.’

• You Shone Like the Sun — backgrounder and brief interview with Syd Barrett … ‘Then, a sound in the hall. Has he come in from the back garden? Perhaps it needs mowing, like the front lawn – although, judging by the mound of weeds by the path, he’s been tidying the beds today. I knock again, and hear three heavy steps. The door flies open and he’s standing there. He’s stark naked except for a small, tight pair of bright-blue Y-fronts; bouncing, like the books say he always did, on the balls of his feet. He bars the doorway with one hand on the jamb, the other on the catch. His resemblance to Aleister Crowley in his Cefalu period is uncanny; his stare about as welcoming…’ [Related: Metafilter Thread]
• Hoax! [Part 1 | Part 2] — Jon Ronson meets America’s Anthrax Hoaxers … ‘Terry first realised that he was in very big trouble when no less a figure than the US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, made a speech about him in a press conference to the world on October 18. Ashcroft announced that the FBI had “arrested Terry Olson for committing a serious crime in connection with terrorist hoaxes”. “What did they charge you with?” I asked him. “Weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “Life imprisonment.” “You must have said to them that Nesquik and sugar aren’t weapons of mass destruction,” I said.’

• John and Edwina — flash game… get them into bed in under six seconds. [via Blogjam]
• Steve Bell draws John Major’s Y-Fronts again. [via Parallax View]

• The Secret Passion that Staggered Westminster … ‘Back to Basics has come back yet again to haunt him, a phrase that must now go down as the most unfortunate, misinterpreted and now clearly misjudged three-word soundbite ever. It was launched at the Conservative conference of 1993. Currie was in the hall. ‘I listened in absolute amazement,’ she said. ‘And if you’re asking me whether I thought that policy was a mistake, absolutely. Not least because it was very cruel to people who were otherwise excellent Ministers, who didn’t deserve to have the magnifying glass turned on their lives at that time by their own leader. If it had been my choice, we would have had a very different policy. It was going against the tone of the times and it was also handled in an extremely cruel fashion. ‘It was cruel to single parents, it was cruel to women left on their own with children, it was pompous and facetious and stupid.’ And, a fact the public only know now, the height of hypocrisy.’
• Don’t Laugh. This is the Real Office — A visit to a real office in Slough … ‘ I have come to the people at Swan to find out what they think of the programme and whether any of them resemble the grotesques on screen. And, of course, they don’t, Gervais’s comedy being a fierce distillation of every lousy trait – jealousy, ambition, self-deception, witty ties – found in every office in every town in Britain today. Instead, their chat represents fairly perfectly the minutiae of life in what Napoleon should more accurately have called a nation of service-sector retail distribution outlet co-workers: house prices, last night’s TV, the drive to work and the perennial search, in Europe’s biggest trading estate, for a decent lunchtime sandwich.’