Author Archives: Carl Morris

Product of more than one country.

My blood group is A rh positive.

I am one day older than MTV.

I take milk but no sugar, ta.

My New Year’s Resolution - White Inbox Every Night

I’m setting myself a few New Year’s Resolutions for 2009.
They’ll also be New Years’ Resolutions. Note the apostrophe placement because some of these things are just too good for only one year.
One of them relates to email.
Email is a blessing and a curse for me. Recently - OK, for the last few years actually - [...]

Thoughts on Attempting a “Review of the Year”

The Joy Collective is a rather splendid blog about music.
It tends to focus on Cardiff, Newport and Bristol, which makes a lot of sense because all three are close enough to share their gig-going crowds. Plus, truly, they are among the UK’s best cities for gigs.
Recently Will at The Joy Collective sent me some questions [...]

The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Merry Christmas.
This clip is from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s very highly recommended The Gospel According to St. Matthew.
The soundtrack is a version of the old negro spiritual Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child as sung by Odetta, who passed away this year.

Sock And Awe Google Analytics (Just A Flash In The Pan?)

After the Bush/Shoe incident, anyone who’d spent even a few moments in eccentric corners of web knew there would be a creative response online. And it came. Wired has a summary of the shoe-inspired games and animations.
So Sock And Awe wasn’t the only Flash game based on the Bush/Shoe event. But it was the best.
Now [...]

Wordwhale - Fun With Anagrams Via Twitter

Meet the Wordwhale.
If you like solving anagrams, the Wordwhale is now pos(t)ing one daily.
Follow @wordwhale to join the lexical fun.
(You don’t need to be signed up to Twitter to try solving it. You can still view the webpage twitter.com/wordwhale to monitor what’s going on and try solving it. But if you’d like to enter and [...]

A Pyramid of All the World’s Knowledge

One video which I really enjoyed this year was this 20-minute talk about endangered languages.
I wasn’t particularly following this subject in any great depth before. Let’s just say raw curiosity can take one to some unexpected places.
You can open it in a new window here.
Dr. David Harrison says:
There are 7,000 languages spoken in the world [...]

What’s the point of Twitter?

Google searches for “Twitter” over time, source: Google Trends
This graph shows the huge increase in searches for the word “Twitter” on Google. It could be said to roughly correspond to the service’s popularity and importance.
Or maybe, for some of the non-adopters, it signals their rising levels of scepticism and annoyance in constantly hearing about [...]

Sleeveface The Book

Sleeveface the book is out now!
Sleeveface has a dedicated blog of its own, so I’ll try not to duplicate too much here. It also has more info about the book.
At the moment we are doing a real mixed bag of press and radio interviews. Sunday Times magazine carried a feature recently, this afternoon I’ve just [...]

Pidgin Stryd

There’s a scene in Alan Bennett’s semi-autobiographical play The History Boys where two teachers are discussing the English language. Hector, played by Richard Griffiths, remarks to his colleague that he loves language. Not merely “words”, he says. “That would be so… Welsh!”. They both chuckle.
I wasn’t able to quote that one exactly as I watched [...]

Beyond YouTube

Mucking about with music video streams isn’t the only misuse of YouTube I’ve been enjoying lately.
Here’s a game called A Car’s Life which is based entirely in YouTube. Click the annotations to save the car, but be quick!
As to how it works, each level has a different video with an annotation linking to the next [...]