Mat Bowles

First up, scalzi is off on a book tour of the US west coast, and has popped in to Google, so they recorded his hour long talk and posted it to YouTube. Scalzi on eBooks, blogging, journalling, comment moderation and how to tape bacon to a cat. Once you get past that accent, very cool. It turns out, via the next item on my feed, that authors talking to Google employees is a regular thing, here, for example, is Neil Gaiman being typically cool. He talks a fair bit about Neverwhere, the adaptation process and what it's like to be Neil Gaiman, not bad. Yes, I have watched both today, yes, that is two hours spent listening to authors talk, and no, don't want that time back. FWIW, Scalzi's Old Man's War is currently vying with scott_lynch's Lies of Locke Lamorra in my 'best book read thus far in 2007' mental slot.

Next up, and of no direct interest to me but probably of interest to a fair number of my friends list, one_track_girl reviews her 5 favourite sex toys. I really like that society has got tot he point where we can, just about, talk about such things openly without dying of embarrassment.

On the subject of sex toys, via qi_news we get the news that:

prehistoric man engaged in a wide range of sexual practices, including group sex, transvestism, bondage and even the use of sex toys, and was used as a way of building up cultural ties between primitive societies.

More on that story of perfectly natural debauchery at The Times. All this monogamous lovey-dovey crap, it's not natural I tell you, it's against nature damnit!

Last up, for now, a few from languagelog, firstly, a campaign to stop asterisking swear words online. Potty-mouthed me is, sort of, 100% behind this story, except that I know from experience modding the Temple and blogging in a few places that completely uncensored swearing causes issues for some people browsing from work or in certain oversees countries. timworstall once had a regular reader and commenter unable to get to his site because Tim had titled a post 'Fuck' and that meant the url was blocked by the Saudi censors. Hmm, what do people think? It's mostly USians that have these issues I think, but are there any Brits that have overly restrictive language-based filters at work?

Then they have another in the snowcone series on silly linguistic myths, this time on the number of words in Arabic for camel. While it's possibly true that there are that many words that recognisably mean camel, saying so in such a manner is about as daft as asserting that English has way ofer well over 100 words for dog. It's true, but it adds little to the debate. Besides, an area very much reliant on camels for basic agricultural use has a breeders show and this is global news? Um, someone better tell the Devon County Show. Just another article in their ongoing series about daft things like "Eskimoes have 400 words for snow". While it might be often said, it is of course completely untrue (although some of the ones on that list are a little interesting, I'd love to know what they do with ertla).

ETA: Oops, nearly forgot. ZX Spectrum far more important than the PS3 will ever be. Help me, I agree with an MSN article! (via raksaksa)

Dear Friend

(via nhw)