Ricky Gervais Xfm shows

Credit and respect to Kai for doing the playlists (Feverish Mind)...

The Ricky Gervais podcast is similar to his early radio show on London's Xfm. Unfortunately, the Xfm site has segmented the shows into 10-12 clips an episode, so instead of listening to an episode, you have to click a link every few minutes. Here's a hack so you can listen to the whole of any of the three series in the Xfm browser...

Early days - Series 1 - Series 2

Of course, an entire series is over 10 hrs long, so you can download the .ASX file by right-clicking the links below, saving it locally, and opening it as a playlist in the in an mp3 player.

Early days (.asx) - Series 1 (.asx) - Series 2 (.asx)

tags: Ricky-Gervais, Karl-Pilkington, podcast, UK, comedy, comedian, funny, download

Ricky Gervais podcast episodes 1 to 9

Update 21/02/06: Please see newer post.


The world's number one podcast apparently, over 2.5 million downloads so far but The Guardian only hosts the latest 4 episodes, so here are the earlier ones in case you missed them:

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7

Episode 8 (temporarily unavailable)
Episode 9 (temporarily unavailable)

tags: Ricky-Gervais, Karl-Pilkington, podcast, UK, comedy, comedian, funny, download

Google's Achilles Heel

Well, it has many: it's spreading itself thinly with wild acquisitions and less than successful innovations, it's growing too fast and has a few legal problems to deal with as well. This is a good article summarising recent developments in googleland with many analyst views and well balanced arguments.

read more | digg story

tags: google, google-is-overvalued, googlemania, investment

50 Most Loathsome People in America

Why only 50? Certainly can't disagree with the top 5, though God should have been higher since his appropriation by the US leadership.

tags: people, USA, list, Bush

Bush to criminalize protesters under Patriot Act as ''disruptors''

I think it's perfectly fair, I mean what kind of citizen uses naughty words to describe their leaders? I'll tell you what kind, bad citizens and unpatriotic ones and enemies of the state and terrorist sympathisers. Learn to love your glorious leader. 2 + 2 is 5...2 + 2 is 5...2 + 2 IS 5.

Well maybe the sarcasm would have been warranted had this story been true. Typical of folk-led aggregators and blog chatter monitors that allow lies to be push to front page prominence. This one was on reddit and no doubt on plenty of others by now. Gullibility of crowds: just put in some hot tag words (Bush never fails to be spotted) and make the story sound plausible but have no basis or supporting facts or citations that can be followed up and away you go, a story that will be linked and reposted repeatedly for a few days.

tags: lies, Bush, crap

The world according to Google (BBC Video)

BBC documentary about googlemania. Again I say, watch the stock tank this year as their hubris is pricked and the market recognises their skyhigh PE and PEG as unsustainable.

read more | digg story

tags: google, google-is-overvalued, googlemania, investment

Tom Cruise kills South Park episode

Cruise threatens legal action against Paramount if they show the South Park episode that draws attention to his homosexuality. The episode in question (912: “Trapped in the Closet”) is sure to be top of the torrents in the coming weeks. This isn't the first time the pint-sized scientologist has taken such measures against anyone that points out his love of man-on-man action. Apparently he has his partners (of either sex) sign NDAs. He is as fervent about homophobia as he is about scientology. BTW, a leading anti-scientology website is streaming the SP episode.

tags: hollywood, gay, celebrity, south-park, tv, lies

US mayor regrets 'God comments'

So first he says God must be "mad at America... for being in Iraq under false pretences".^*1
Now he retracts this and other equally inappropriate comments - New Orleans to be a "chocolate" city! Mayor Nagin at least is consistent with his stupidity.

^*1 I guess it was a different God that once told Bush to attack Iraq.

tags: USA, stupidity, politics

When the Delusional Becomes Normative: George Bush's War on Science

Bush administration: tough stance on science is seeking to reverse The Enlightenment. Evolution-believing teachers are subjected to McCarthyite witch hunts in the same way as climate change scientists have been.

tags: Bush, science, politics, religion, Christianity, ethics, stupidity

The Impeachment of George W. Bush

From "The Nation" this has climbed into the top 20 of reddit within 2 days. It's also had the 2nd highest number of comments on reddit. Particularly insightful are comments by gwenhwyfaer and tonyl.

tags: Bush, USA, government, legal, reddit

Shares of Google headed for a fall?

Googlemania is no longer restricted to geeky fanboys but has spread far and wide. The company is ridiculously overvalued by any traditional measure. Those of us with a memory longer than 6 years recognise this immediately. Google's megalomaniacal attitude, their gimmicky "innovations", wild acquisitions and inability to handle spam, pagerank manipulation and click fraud all point in the same direction. And again it will begin within the geekdom as Google takes over the mantle of being the most hated company away from MS. At least one analyst is coming out and showing some concern. The rest just follow the crowd and boost it up to $600 and even to $2000

tags: google, google-is-overvalued, googlemania, investment

Another day, another new blog

So here I am, 2006 and I'm starting a blog. I'm leading edge me. Not to mention the unoriginal name. This really is doomed from the start isn't it?

What's the point^*1? Well, for you^*2, not much. For me it's a single place to collect remnants of my digital life in one place. All those interesting snippets and links and shit. The tools and tips and stuff. And in the age old tradition of blogging: arbitrary lists of things deemed worthy of listing; sometimes ranked, other times just listed for the sake of listing. My favourite freeware, favourite Firefox extensions, the best Javascript functions ever and so on and on and on. Actually, no one would have failed to notice that this obsession to list isn't peculiar to the blogosphere; it pervades all media and has done so for a while now. Channel 4, for instance, almost every other weekend devotes as much as 6 hours over successive nights listing and ranking the best this or that (recently it was "50 Greatest Comedy Films" and "100 Movie Quotes"). The other channels not wanting to miss a trick get the same z-listers to reminisce about their favourite toys or favourite adverts or favourite toy adverts. Won't be long before we get "100 All Time Best List Shows". And Jimmy Carr will host it. And Jonathan Ross's brother, "The Lesser Ross"^*3 as he is known, will feature heavily talking about what he liked about the 70s and how truly great that moment was when they did that lesbian kiss in Brookside and shit like that. It's Media Incest gone wild. Too much available air time, not enough money or creativity for original content. That should be this blog's tagline shouldn't it?

^*1 This recognition puts me in a small camp of weak futilitarians. Believing that there really is no point to anything but still plodding along knowing that really there really is no real point, really. A strong futilitarian wouldn't even bother writing this sentence, and now I wish I hadn't either.

^*2 That's if there is a you. Considering that most blogs get no visitors except bots and spiders in their first few months of existence. After that most people only tend to skim read the majority leaving just an elite few blogs that get an avid readership. So early life for a blog is a vain solipsistic existence: in a dichotomy between smugness and desperation.

^*3 Lesser only in stature and talent, not in TV exposure, both seem to be on some show or other at least 5 times a week.