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Hummingbird names

Roddy has a list of some interesting names of birds found in India over at Vitamin Q. I can’t resist adding some of the species of hummingbird found in Venezuela:

Glowing Puffleg
Mountain Velvetbreast
Lazuline Sabrewing
Golden-bellied Starfrontlet
Spangled Coquette
Gorgetted Woodstar
Forktailed Woodnymph
White-necked Jacobin
Fiery Topaz
White-vented Plumeleteer
Black-eared Fairy
White-bearded Hermit
Pale-tailed Barbthroat
Booted Racket-tail
Sapphire-spangled Emerald
Merida Sunangel
Green-breated Mango

And that’s without even getting into all the non-hummingbird names, like the Oleaginous Hemispingus, the Red-ruffed Fruitcrow and the Striped Woodhaunter.

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WordPress Theme Competition

The WP theme comp I mentioned entering before seems to have been a peculiarly elaborate hoax, though I can’t see what they gained from it. Anyway, there’s now a new WordPress Theme Competition set up by people miffed at the collapse of the last one. I’ll probably enter it – after all, the alternative is just releasing my theme. The prizes are less exciting, but at least they exist.

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Culture Other

mock-mock

I went to an event at City Hall today, the details of which shall be revealed on Sunday. City Hall is right next to Tower Bridge, and I was thinking what a strange thing it is: a Gothic mechanised bridge. Particularly since the Victorians didn’t obviously erect such things in a spirit of fun or irony. I guess they just didn’t see anything odd about it.

The bridge has a peculiar relationship with the Tower of London. They stand there together, both in the same coloured stone and a similar style, and invite you to think of them as a matched pair. The Tower, of course, is genuinely medieval, but depending what mood you’re in, either the influence of the bridge lends the Tower a false, Disney quality, or the Tower gives the bridge a spurious air of ancientness. It’s hard to believe that 800 years separates the two of them.

There aren’t many medieval buildings left in London, mainly because of the Great Fire, and curiously enough another of them has a very similar dynamic going on – Westminster Abbey, which sits next to the rampant gothicity of the Houses of Parliament. If the Abbey was surrounded by glistening glass and steel office blocks, it would seem more genuine.

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The Lipstick of Noise

Poetry MP3 blog The Lipstick of Noise is back up and running.

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Ashley Cole and gay footballers

Ashley Cole, who plays at left-back for Arsenal and England, has sent his lawyer to complain to Google because at the moment, if you search for ‘Ashley Cole’, it says:

See results for: ashley cole gay

Possibly even more bizarrely, from a legal point of view, he’s suing the News of the World over a story that didn’t even name him. The NOTW claimed “two bisexual stars made some very dirty phone calls – using a mobile phone as a gay sex toy” and published a heavily-photoshopped shot supposedly of them. Some internet detective work suggests that the photo is Ashley Cole.

I have no idea whether Cole is gay, and I dont think it’s anyone else’s business anyway (he’s one of the best left-backs in the world, he’s English, it’s a World Cup year; come on people, let’s get our priorities straight). The trouble is, while I don’t think it’s important, I do rather want to know, because it’s a good piece of gossip. We have such an ambiguous relationship with the idea of celebrity privacy; I don’t actually want to cause Cole any more upset than he’s dealing with already, but I can’t resist poking around the internet for the details and repeating some of them here.

There must be a few thousand professional footballers in the UK; surely at least one or two are gay. This would be a better country if they didn’t feel they had to keep it a secret, and someone is going to have to be the first to come out since Justin Fashanu. Fashanu, though, ended up hanging himself. Even in the 8 years since that happened, I think the public’s attitude to homosexuality has probably moved on a lot, but between football crowds and the tabloid media, it would be seriously tough for anyone to have to deal with. It would be nice to think that the fans might surprise us by taking it all in their stride, but at the recent Liverpool/Manchester United match, the Liverpool fans were chanting about the Munich air disaster and the Man U fans were chanting about Hillsborough, so we’re not talking about models of sensitivity here.

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Ah, the first stirrings of young love…

You know what they say: Once you go Mac, you never go back.

I don’t want to come over *too* Apple-fanboy. I know they’re just a more expensive way of doing all the same things you can do on a PC. What I find quite interesting, though, is how much people seem to miss the point. Whenever Apple discussions start on the net, you get frustrated geeks tearing their hair out at the irrationality of buying a Mac/iPod when you can get a rival product with the same specs for less money, and the accusation is that people are just buying into the stylish marketing, that it’s all design and therefore superficial. But when Apple are at their best, and most Apple-y, it’s not superficial – it’s design all the way down. The marketing is stylish, the online shop is attractive and easy to use, the box it comes in looks cool, the actual machine is even cooler-looking; but really what matters is that the software is uncluttered and easy to use. I have no idea whether the underlying system architecture and the hardware are well-designed, but they seem to work pretty consistently. The cosmetic stuff is a reflection of a design philosophy that makes the user experience a priority instead of an afterthought. Which isn’t to say that Apple have never made any stupid decisions or bad products, but at least they understand that design actually matters and they try to make a good job of it.

We should be able to take good design for granted. It shouldn’t be a luxury.