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Buried Sense

Anna Nicole Smith has been dead for about a week now. Indeed as Fox News presenters were frantically asking each other on the day of her discovery, "is she still dead?" I think this could be paraphrased with "do we still have a tragedy to sensationalise?"

Anyway, little about Smith's recent life, death or subsequent legal spaghetti is funny - that is, until Florida judge Larry Seidlin was brought in to restore some sort of order regarding Smith's burial location.

As, I'm assuming, is the point, I was glazedly (yes I did just make up that word) glazing over the newsglaze presented by CNN, when my attention was aroused by the oddity that is Seidlin's professional delivery. I needed youtube so I could find comparable clips of Arrested Development's Barry Zuckerkorn (the inept Bluth family lawyer played by Henry Winkler).

Much to my dismay, I could find no clip with which to draw the comparison. I did however come across the following montage of chicken-dance clips:

Among the many odd quotes to come from the mouth of the face attached to the neck attached to Seidlin's slouched leather-chair-bound body,"This body belongs to me right now," he said. "This body's not leaving Broward County till I make the ruling." (FOX NEWS)

Often jokey, at several points in the discussion, Seidlin's comments left most of the lawyers in the room utterly confused. Flattery proved a decent enough appeasement, with all of the lawyers sheepishly thanking the judge for complimenting their fine lawyer work.

"When we bury her, I want it to be forever," Seidlin said.
"For we'll never bury her
In a restless world like this is
Burial is ended before it's begun
And too many moonlight kisses
Seem to cool in the warmth of the sun."

New blog design

I've updated the look of this blog, to be more consistent with the redesign I'm working on for my own web site. This also goes some way to explaining my recent slowdown of activity on this blog!

The new site will be finished soon, with more up-to-date work, links and archived work. It will be easier to read and easier to navigate. It will look the same on most browsers!

UUUUUrrrrrghhhh,

J

To blame your tools, use some, pt1

I thought I'd feature some useful free apps on this blog, for those who are interested. I apologise for the fact that most of these are Mac applications. There may well be Windows equivalents, or straight Windows versions of the same package, but my posts will be about the Mac versions.

I'm going to start with a program called VoodooPad. Those of you who are interested in the postential of multilinear texts might do worse than try this out.

It's a simple application, aimed at those who need a functional way to organise projects. It is in fact extremely useful for this, since projects - to coin an awful corporate term - often rely on hubs and spokes to be manageable. Interrelated items of a project can link to each other, and the user can navigate even complex project structures with hypertextual point-and-click ease.

Since VoodooPad essentially creates HTML pages as you go, this could be viewed as an ultra-stripped-down web site editor. As such, it offers potential use as a hypertext poetry/narrative tool which is both functional and simple. Although it is hardly a bells and whistles multimedia wizard, it nonetheless offers beginner programmers with an interest in writing hypertexts the opportunity to experiment with such a concept, and perhaps go further if it whets your appetite. Failing that, VoodooPad is really useful for organising any projects you might have on the go.

VoodooPad Lite is free, and does plenty. It can be downloaded here, and the full version can also be found on the site if you wish to purchase it.

Related:

Jeff Parker, A Poetics of the Link
http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr12/park/park.htm

NVU - free HTML editor for more advanced use - THIS IS CROSS PLATFORM! (Mac, Linux, Windows)

Ready, Aim, FATHER.

Donot