“groovy mother...”

You rang, America?

This cartoon by the brilliant Steve Bell was too good not to share:

OLLYWOO

Joy & I finally got around to watching the ’“Joey(NBC.com > Primetime Preview)’:http://www.nbc.com/nbc/Primetime_Preview_04_05/new_shows.shtml#joey pilot that I downloaded off the net a few weeks ago. And it has to be said: It’s pretty damned good. Plenty of belly chuckles, and a nice mix of characters. )

It’s grabbable via BitTorrent if you want to see it before September.

Clintonation

Joy & I watched Bill Clinton’s speech to the DNC tonight, and I was blown away.

I never really saw much of Clinton, the politician, while he was in power. I read about him in the British papers, saw all the jokes about the sleaze and scandal on comedy shows, and that’s about it.

It wasn’t until I saw his speech to the Labor Party conference in 2002 that I really “got” what an incredible speaker and politician Clinton is. Just reading his words again now stirs up emotions within me of “Why isn’t this man still the president?”

And tonight… just… Wow! He effortlessly managed to crack jokes, share vision, and deliver an oratory which emphasized how crappy our current president is. Everytime you see Bush speak, you can picture 30 staffers working in the background on the policy and wording. Clinton gives the appearance of not only believing every word he is saying, but that he wrote it himself.

I only hope that Kerry can deliver something half as powerful on Thursday night.

Good(?) Housekeeping

I’ve been doing some tidying up here on the site. There were a bunch of things I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

• The Atom feed for the main site now includes “Groovy Links”. Since I’m doing far more link-posting than actual blogging, this seemed like a smart move.
• I’ve “soft-retired” the RSS feed. Maintaining two feed formats is too much hassle. Since Atom allows me to do more than RSS, and almost all feedreaders support it, I’ve set the RSS feed to only contain entry titles. You are cordially invited to resubscribe to the Atom feed, which contains full posts.
• I did some cleaning-up of the HTML and CSS for the site. I think it looks a lot better, but then I would, wouldn’t I.

Comments on all this are welcomed with open arms.

“Work”ing from “Home”

For most of my professional life, “Working from Home” has been little more than a euphemism for “Taking a day off without using a vacation day”. It’s up there with “Dentist’s Appointment” being roughly equivalent to “Job Interview”.

But this week, I’m working from home, and will actually need to do work. At home! Due to the laugh-a-minute hijinks that is the DNC, with its associated road closures, there’s no way I’m setting foot (or tyre, as would be more appropriate) on I-93, which is the stretch of tarmac between my home and office.

This is a bit of a problem, since I will be in a location containing a couch, a bed, two TiVos, a bunch of books I haven’t read, and a stack of DVDs I haven’t watched.

Anyone got any useful advice on forcing myself to actually do some work?