2 posts tagged “speechification”
Today was a good day. The three DVDs I ordered from Go Faster Strip arrived, along with some Richard Herring bonus material. This is the second time I've ordered from them and they seem very reliable and they aren't at all expensive. Three DVDs may seem a lot but I have a 33 hour journey to Christchurch on Thursday - assuming all the planes travel to schedule - so three DVDs and a good long book (Miss Marple Omnibus) are definite requirements.
I'm also glad to see that more stuff is appearing on Speechification, now that summer is nearing its end. The ABC documentary about the only hooker in the village promises an interesting story, as does the two part documentary about Two Tone. Between the book, the DVDs and an iPod full of podcasts I should arrive somewhere close to sane.
But the thing that really cheered me up today was a map. The Strange Maps blog regularly comes up with fascinating pieces of cartography. Maps of people, places, stories, languages and more. Today's map came courtesy of the New York Times, which used some clever software and a database to show a lovely map of the medal table for all the previous Olympic Games.
Strange Maps showed the map for the Athens games but I don't think that was the most interesting map in the set shown on the NY Times web site. That was the map for the 1980 games. As soon as I saw it I knew that something was wrong and based on that I knew who the host was.
OK, if you go to the full map on the NY Times site you'll see the name of the host city in the top right corner. But this one screams "Moscow!" at you even if you didn't look there. East Germany is just too big and there's no USA. Not one medal for America must mean that they didn't let their athletes compete and that must mean the Olympics overshadowed by the Afghan invasion.
That's not funny, but the fact that the East German bubble is so swollen by medals that it spreads over the edge like an athlete full of anabolic steroids is. Not that I approve of the state poisoning athletes so that they can win in a proxy battle against a cold war enemy - but the imagery itself is quite amusing.
Not many people know this but I was used to work on a farm. Not for long. In fact, just just for an hour or two, really. I helped stock a few sheds with day-old baby chickens that would be on a sanitary towel and under wrap in a chiller cabinet six weeks later. This is what they look like when they're a day old.
We all know what they look like at the other end.
Which is why I was so happy to hear Marcus Brigstocke's rant about chicken on this evening's Now Show. (~18 minutes in). It was superbly offensive but made a point that really needs making. It's more important to eat a small amount of something that tasty that you made yourself than to gorge on plastic-wrapped packet food. I'm glad I was eating a crispy, tart apple while I listened.
I loved the beard joke, too.
Hurry and download it. It's a topical show and the MP3 will disappear in a week if it's not picked up an archived by the wonderful Speechification blog.
Updated
I published and straight away noticed this great post from penguinmad. I am incredibly jealous. I always wanted to keep chickens when I was a kid but my parents didn't let me because we had so many foxes in the garden. Now I live in a 5th floor apartment I can't keep chickens.
