dang
ovan
.com

Sup!
I redid the layout for the bio page. Out with the floats and in with position absolutes. It's a bit more slimline and varying text size won't mess it up so much. Hurrah! But my point in posting about it is to ask if someone could look at it through Safari and see how it renders? Maybe email me a screenie?
Ta!
UPDATE: Sweet, Safari agrees with IE and FF! Thanks muchly for the SSs! 'Course now I'm considering using pos:abs consistantly, instead of the ker-azy nesting floats that hit every IE bug in the book, as well as a few Safari ones. But the workarounds are so 1337! :-/

Other UPDATE: I've done the same on the permalink/comments pages. "position: absolute; left: 35%;" etc for the win.

Artemis has gone quite mad. Manchego for the win! Clearly the king of cheeses. Particularly the milder variaties. Mmmmm… Oh, and marmite ftw too. And Capers. And Celery. But probably not all together.

I've heard about unseasonable temperatures confusing birds into nesting early and whatnot, indeed the back garden is teeming with noisy bird life on bare branches… But that doesn't explain the eight plus bright green parrots. I hadn't realised that Shepherds Bush's multiculturalism extended to its avian population.

Maybe I was just being ignorant, but way-back-when when I used to think of music from Canada I thought of Alanis Morissette, Celine Dion, Brian Adams, Avril Lavigne, and Bare Naked Ladies… Nowadays the associations run more along the lines of Death Cab for Cutie, Metric, Broken Social Scene, The Postal Service, and now Stars, a set of great bands that seem to have quite a bit of crossover between them in terms of members.
Looking a little further I also find that The Arcade Fire, The Tragically Hip, The New Pornographers and Wolf Parade are Canadian too? What are they putting in the water there? Rufus Wainwright isn't Canadian but pretends he is. Heh.
Anyway, go listen to some Stars, their third albums "Set Yourself On Fire" is amazing. It hits a subtle balance between something like Metric and Deathcab. It's good. Go listen. Via their website or Pandora (which is really good by the way! You have to enter an American Zip Code to use it, but it isn't difficult to find one) or whatever other means.
In other news, I've plonked an unconvincing plug-in here showing top artists listened to last week. It only shows things listened to in iTunes though :-(

When a bunch of what seemed to be primarily London gayers gathered to watch Brokeback Mountain, doubtless each group of people had already individually acknowledged the inherent comedy in Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger playing gay cowboys in a film whose name seemed to morph into "Bareback" of it's own volition, and probably at great length. Well, it is quite funny. I think it's fair to say there was something of a sceptical air.
As the film began us punters couldn't help but pigeon-hole the characters into probable roles and stereotypes; often I thought I knew what was about to happen, and was taken aback when it didn't. The crowd would laugh as one in what was then quickly made clear had been "the wrong place", and follow it with a quick hush and an almost tangible "oops" or "oh dear" as we were gradually disabused of these easy exits. There are no heroes or villains in this film, nor sex objects or comedy relief, every character plays out as completely believable, understandable, 3-d people. Sorry, it's not a gay Hollywood cowboy sex romp thing.
That's not to say it shies away from the issues involved, but then it doesn't paint them in eight-foot high neon letters either; it doesn?t need to. It's tasteful, subtle and complex, the kind of film where so much more can be inferred from what is seen. It reminds me in many ways of Giorni, but then the fact I've got to go to an obscure Italian film for even the vaguest parallels nicely illustrates how few and fucking far between good films that about believable gay characters really are. Yeah, so, highly recommended; everyone can take something different away from this. It's a great film anyway, the fact it's a great film about gayers likely makes it unique too.
I'm pretty sure I garbled much of that, so here's a much better review (aside from the last paragraph, which isn't about the film).

Further still into the 21st Century and still no antigravity, direct computer/human interfaces or bionic modularisation of mankind. What's up with that?
NYE was a roaring success, even if I do say so myself. I'm not sure what it is in particular about New Year's Eve but I've had an excellent night out every NYE since 1999, so yay! Much of the night involved people playing up to the many cameras in impressions of various animals, many of which are bordering on the grotesque… OK that might just be the ones of me.
As well as the ones you can see in the flickr badge to the right, more photos than you could ever want can be found from the camera's and spangly camera-phones of myself, M, Seldo, Wabson and Si.
Albums currently impressing me lots, and therefore being listened to over and over are:
The Secret Machines: Now Here Is Nowhere
Louis XIV: The Best Little Secrets Are Kept
Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
Stars: Set Yourself On Fire
All really good! I spoke too soon on The Decemberists though; they've quickly fallen out of favour.