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For the last 2 hours I’ve been overwhelmed by calls from disgruntled, worried eBay customers.  It seems that eBay have sent a few hundred people (my best guess) an email advising them that I’ve recieved their money for a 2nd hand Vespa motrbike which I am about to ship.

The bike in question is long-gone: I received cash and personally met the buyer, so it’s physically impossible for anybody else to be the buyer of this singular item.  Nevertheless, eBay’s systems have sent an email to a large number of customers informing all of them that they have paid-up and will all be the lucky recipients of my old bike.

For now I’ve changed my answerphone message to advise worried callers that I did not send the message and that they need to take up the matter with eBay’s customer services department. Hopefully if enough people ring then they will take note and attempt to correct their own mistakes.

I wonder, am I the only person affected by this bug? It seems preposterous that eBay have singled-out little-old-me for this special treatment!

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According to the blurb on YouTube, “This is the video for “Minger” by Meadow House (from ‘Tongue Under a Ton of Nine Volters’ on Alcohol Records). Upon its release as a single in 2006, this was rampantly dvd-dropped in public places around London and Hertfordshire.”
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/0UVDCRReku0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Meadow House is also known as Dan Wilson, the man who gave us Epistaxis Time and Exciting Hellebore Shew on Resonance FM. The wonky sound of this recording comes from Dan’s preference of minging home-made musical instruments. The box-like fretless electric guitar in the 5th second of the video is but one of the contraptions that were specially built in order to facilitate this recording.

Most people imagine that the risk of being struck by lightning is somewhat similar to the risk of winning the National Lottery, or perhaps that of “close-encounters� style alien abduction. Anybody who has spent some time in a hospital burns unit will know that this blatantly untrue: In the UK, lightning strikes are frequent incidents – the victims mostly die instantly, but those who are not electrocuted usually make a complete recovery. I know this for a fact because about fifteen years I was struck by lightning, and have lived to tell the tale.

The people who most frequently become victims of lightning are golfers and mountaineers. The first category tend to be determined men who play through the rain. On a gently undulating golf course, a raised golf-club acts like a perfect lightning conductor; a metal spike which will guide the millions of volts through the sportsman’s arms and into his heart and lungs.

The second group attract the lightning because like the golfer, their metallic mountaineering kit provides a more convenient route for for the spark to cross from the clouds and the earth. Climbing axes and crampons provide an ideal form of earthing which makes the climber into a human lightning rod. In the case of the unfortunate mountaineer, he is more likely to be killed by a sudden fall then the electric shock.

When I was struck by lightning I was neither a mountaineer, nor a golfer: I was a schoolboy.

I attended a famous school called Repton. It’s famous for being the place where Roald Dahl got bullied (and became his inspiration for “Boyâ€�). It was also the educational institution responsible for that pillar of society Jeremy Clarkson. Like most British private schools, Repton had a profitable arrangement with the Ministry of Defense.

(more…)

The literary world abounds with tales of lost books; These are manuscripts which have been mislaid and masterpieces which never made it to the press. Just search google for “lost novels” for a very long lost of famous novelists and their missing works.

This week, the Resonance FM Podcast site will tell the story of what is perhaps the most obscure and befuddling tale of lost fiction. Frank Key will be lecturing us on the origin, supression, recovery and destruction of Maude Glub’s only work of fiction, “The Book of Gnats”.

Would any legal types care to speculate on the the enforcability of street signage that requires a knowledge of local fixtures in order to comply? The assumption is that all men and women who drive cars must take an avid interest in football.

I found this sign not far from Finsbury park, but at least a ten minute walk away from the various venues that Arseal football club have used or are likely to use in the near future. Could a vehicle owner who received a ticket on a Sunday claim ignorance of soccer schedules?

Might parking permissions be tied to other events in future? Perhaps astrological or certain martyr’s feasts days will also be subject to additional parking permissions.

Dear readers of the infernal bloggosphere. I present to you my hard-won collection of Frank Key novels and pamphlets. These are truly rare items of literature, each has been out of print for at least a decade.

Some of you will know Frank Key as the humorist behind Resonance FM’s “Hooting Yard on the Air“. Others will know him by his messy web-pages, but few people knwo that long before these modern contrivances he was an out of print pamphleteer. My collection currently includes:

• A House of Turps Tryptich
• The Immense Duckpond Pamphlet
• Twitching and Shattered
• The Hooting Yard 1991 Calendar
• Sydney the Bat is Awarded the Order of Lennin.

Click on any of the above links to see photos of the item.

Kudos to Robert Levi for creating a bizarre peice of ‘outsider’ media: called “Radcliffe Project“, 21 minutes of not-quite slash-fiction combined with copious conspiracy theories, but performed as a commentary to the 2nd Harry-Potter movie. This disturbing, but hillarious performance can be downloaded from the radio4all podcast network.

The premise of this recording is that the performer allegedly believes that the child actor (Radcliffe) from the Harry Potter fims is somehow in love with him. He alleges that the Harry Potter films contain coded messages of put theire by the child actors with the assistance of the film’s directors.

These messages are intended to tell us that the actors are prisoners of the Time-Warner film company, who are agents of the author J.K. Rowling. We are told that she is some sort of criminal mastermind and wishes to subject the children to peril for her personal financial gain. We also learn that Radcliffe is not British but from New Jersey.

As with the best outsider media, we are left to judge if this is a genuinely disturbed mind or fake insanity. Clearly his theories are absurd but that is not the point: The question is, does he geuninely believe these notions or is it just a performance?

The low production standards and creepy voiceover (we can hear the film playing in the background), make either interpretation likely. Could he actually believe that child actors in an entirely different continent are sending him coded messages of affection? Am I sick for finding humor in what might actually be a criminal offense in some countries? If you are able to derive any pleasure from this hap-hazardly produced stream of conciousness, it comes from the ambiguity. There are no clues which would obviously mark this performance as a work of humor, and yet it is brilliant comedy.

I’ve just uploaded three more episodes of the exciting “Epistaxis Time” podcast series to the archive. Please listen and be disturbed. I’ve also posted the last 2004 episode of “Hooting Yard” to the Resonance podcast collection.

The volume of trackbacks and comments on my blog has recently increased. It’s not a reaction to my incisive technical commentary, nor is it the league of goths and Stargate SG1 nerds who regularly post in order call me a lamer.

The spammers have returned and this time with more sophisticated spambots which are capable of eluding the first generation of Wordpress anti-spam plugins I installed two months ago. I’ve just upgraded my spam-fighting tools, and I am curious to see how effective the spammers will be against a combination of anti bot techniques.

In the meantime, I wonder what it is that the spammers are hoping to gain; They are using some of the most advanced blog spamming techniques to advertise some of the most ludicrous and easily filtered-out websites. These consist of pages of computer generated gibberish. I expect that they are designed to draw traffic away from Google, however since all these computer generated sites share the same structure and run from a small number of IP addresses, Google will have no difficulty in blacklisting all of them.

I cannot work it out; A great deal of effort has gone into running a spamming campaign, but without any obvious payoff, and a strategy so fatally flawed as to render it not worth bothering with in the first place.

The Jedi Song is an animation which features everything: winged monkeys, Jar-Jar’s death, eggs on swings, and the full text of an undiscovered Shakespeare play.
Alright… not that last one.

The video was made for a song originally strummed by my good friend Mark Huckerby one Saturday morning in Wandsworth circa 1998. I had come up from Cowfold to do a student radio show together with Mark, Nick Ostler, Catherine Chew, Paul Lewis and Salim Fadhley. We made the song into a short sketch involving a drunk Obi-Wan Kenobi trying to use his powers to get a free Shepherd’s Pie.

A while later (about five years later) the very talented Rob Stangroom rearranged the song into the current version. He played all the instruments and sung along with Nick and Mark. I can’t remember why I wasn’t there… they gave me very specific directions which led me to a dark thicket where I was assaulted by three men in balaclavas.

Anyway I swore one day to animate to the song and with only five days to spare before the new film came out, and with a new job and moving house to contend with, I begun the Herculean task. It’s a bit rushed in places, and there are some places where I would have liked to animate instead of having still images. Hey-ho, maybe one day.

UPDATE: If you are having difficulties playing the movie please try updating your software before asking for help here. If you use Windows we suggest that you view the web-page using Mozilla Firefox. If you want to play the MP3 file, we suggest downloading Apple iTunes – It’s free. If you use a Mac, then things should work fine in Safari or Mozilla Firefox. We suggest that you do not use Internet Explorer. As with Windows, iTunes is completely free and has no problem playing the MP3 file.