I feel as if I have awoken from a deep sleep.
For the first time in 18 months, I have found new music that moves me.
It’s like I have been buried underground, listening to the worms and centipedes all this time.
Suddenly, I’m receptive to new tunes, it seems the gloom has passed.
Ladies and gentlemen: Jesca Hoop.
What do you do when you read a tweet purporting to be a suicide note? Do you take it seriously? Do you wonder if perhaps it’s some form of creative musing? Do you DO anything?
That was my dilemma this morning, when I started reading tweets posted from within 1km radius of my location.
There is was “Personal Post: Suicide”.
My problem was, the damn thing was in the Spanish language, linking via bit.ly to a blogpost, and while I have a decent grasp of Spanish, I wouldn’t pick up on nuances suggesting it was a gag the same way as I would in English.
“27 Minutes Ago,” it said beside the tweet. I’m too late now anyway, I thought, trying to give myself comfort.
He wrote, “this is the end of the road”; “soon I’ll lose consciousness”; “I’ve just taken 146 pills”; “I’m lying on my sofa, waiting for this to happen”; “goodbye life, goodbye world”.
Great. What do I do? Phone the police? And tell them what? “No, I don’t know the guy, nor even his name”; “No, I don’t know exactly where he is”. “Yes, yes, I read this on Twitter, what’s Twitter? Oh, well, Twitter is…”
And all this in Spanish you realise, because this is happening in Barcelona. So I phone a Spanish-speaking friend to parse the blog post, the language, to assess the gravity of it. “Too busy, sorry,” she replied. I felt like a fool trying to explain the thing to her. She must think I’m mad. Shite!
What now? Check Twitter again, see if he’s still tweeting… nothing… nothing for the last 35 minutes.
Do I look-up the whois on the domain name on which the blog resides to get a phone number; do I tweet back to ask “Um, are you still alive?”; do I contact his followers; or perhaps I SHOULD call the police.
Then, suddenly, signs of life, 40 minutes after his suicide-post, he tweets again, he’s still alive, it’s nothing related, it’s a retweet, boring in its absolute normality.
What DO you do?
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Here’s his Twitter - “Post Personal: El Suicido” (February 3rd around 10am GMT). It’s an odd time to commit suicide, I thought.
I was testing Google’s Gaudi application today, which allows searchers to find words buried in the audio channel of videos they watch.Being Irish, I decided to search the word “Ireland” and was intrigued to find Obama, Larry King, Rudy Guiliani and John Edwards all speaking about Ireland recently… except they weren’t, they were speaking about “Iowa”. Why? Well, it seems Gaudi needs a little more tweaking, when the word/name “Iowa” is spoken, it thinks it’s hearing “Ireland”. Shame. And I thought we were suddenly popular!
… publish those intentions, for even if you doubt you can complete it, other people’s expectations will make you do so.
So. I’m on my first week of marathon training. I’ve never run, or trained, in my life.
I intend to run the New York Marathon in late 2009.
Below, taken July 31st, my running-companion, personal-trainer, and myself - the day we received our training schedule. First run-out took place on August 4th.
… hard to believe. Quite bloody frightening. More here.
I was in Berlin at the weekend, and I picked up a copy of “Der Tagesspiegel”, a broadsheet struggling to communicate the message “Ireland” and “No”, visually. They did it in the following way:
Click for full view.
Interesting to see yesterday the national quality daily “La Vanguardia” of Spain calling Taoiseach / Irish prime minister Brian Cowen, a Biffo, though they translated the “Fucker” in Biffo (the first “F”) as “Fellow” instead. Last paragraph sees them calling him Biffo in the context of the story. Bizarre. I can’t see the Irish media calling Zapatero a Fucker from Valladolid! (Click on thumbnail for larger version).
Spam subject lines don’t often make me laugh, but this one did: “Turn Your Dwarf Into A Giant!”