Blog My Wiki!

Just got my copy of “Leicester Square’ – the best of Yeah Yeah Noh CD – re-issued by the good people at Cherry Red.

Yeah Yeah Noh were a horribly obscure indie band in the 1980s, championed by John Peel at a time when I was listening to – and taping – a lot of John Peel.

Their music is shambolic but charming, the lyrics just wonderful. Like any truly interesting band, they take you somewhere you’ve never been before. Somewhere weird that you don’t fully understand.

Aside from Joe Orton, I think they could be Leicester’s only contribution to popular culture.

After me, 1, 2, 3…

Wraparound shades hide a weakling pasty face
Beware the weakling!
Hipster pants on a feeble ass bad taste
Beware the weakling!
…
I’ll take you back to my fledgling flat
show you my jigsaw collection
score 50,000 on space invaders
a Rubik cube fob novelty
hangs at the waist of the weakling
the fruit of second division loins
everyone’s doing the weakling thing…

Phillip Erwood liked Yeah Yeah Noh – he met them after a gig once and shyed away from buying their fanzine. He regretted that later. Sigh.

This is the best web site in the world. Ever.
http://www.sr.se/p1/src/sing/index.htm

When my first child was very small he could drag a mouse around but couldn’t get the hang of holding the mouse button down and dragging at the same time – even the simplest paint program for children requires the child to click to make a mark.

So I had an idea for a very simple paint program that would allow very small children to doodle on the screen without having to click.

I never got around to writing my paint program when Henry was small, nor William. But now Tilly is here and I managed to figure it out.

You can download the first, very simple version of TillyPaint here, for Mac or Windows.

It’s like a cross between finger painting and Etch-a-Sketch.

It’s quite therapeutic for grown-ups too.

Looking for a Tintin font for Henry’s 6th birthday invites – I found a rather good free font site – dafont. The bitmapped fonts are dreamy, and I love Bradley Gratis – reminds me of the William Morris Kelmscott Chaucer font, and of course Will Bradley and beautiful covers for magazines like The Inland Printer.
There’s even a Tintin Talking font too!

Despite a cease-and-desist order from Studio Peyo, who own the Smurfs, Websmurfer is still going. It translates web pages into Smurf language. And let’s face it, this is what the internet was invented for. Anyone remember AskJesus?

Well it’s not quite as thorough as AskJesus, but here’s it’s take on a BBC News story on Sony’s stupid anti-piracy CDs:

The move came after security firms said hackers were exploiting the softsmurf to hide their creations.

Sony said it had a right to stop smurfs illegally copying music, but added that the halt was smurfily precautionary.