I’ve just finished reading a excerpt from Haruki Murakami’s book about his obsessive running, and in particular a 100KM “ultramarathon” he completed (it’s taken me a while to get round to, it was in the Observer in July). He’s been one of my favourite authors in recent years, but something has disturbed me about finding out he was into running (a pastime I find incredibly dull).

I now feel the same way that you do when you find out a girl you like is a dog person rather than a cat person, or that someone likes Oasis, or watches Eastenders.

It’s not as bad a discovering someone votes tory tho’.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

No seen this before.

Mark Ronson is Mike Flowers, and not even good Mike Flowers. Can he please go away?

You may have read about four parts of the UK being up for £50M of National Lottery funding - the catch being that they have to compete again on a ITV televised debate.

Doesn’t that just seem wrong? We pay, or give the contact to, a large corporation in order for them to hire experts and have processes about how to devolve this ‘Lottery Money’ to the best causes, but instead of that they use the exercise as an advertising stunt.

Instead of democracy, or meritocracy, there’s another payday for the TV companies, the phone companies, there’s people feeling pressured and at least three communities feeling cheated.

“It won’t be as sexy as Strictly Come Dancing, but this is going to change whole communities,” said Sir Clive Booth, chairman of the Big Lottery Fund.

Does it have to be sexy, couldn’t it just change the communities, couldn’t it be targeted to do the most good?

I wanted to write something in order to solidify my thoughts on why blog comments seemingly are more likely to be negative rather than positive, this isn’t going to be interesting or original. Probably it’s something to do with how if there’s something you don’t like it’s more important to “vocalise” it than when you like it. But there’s more to it than that.

No more so than with buildings and design, as they are subjects everyone can have an opinion on. As a sometime professional graphic designer (well, more layout really, but unless you’re a design star that’s prety much all you get to do) I detest showing artwork to clients as they have opinions which they can’t back up with anything but a gut feeling. You end up trying to explain design theory, or just giving up and doing whatever they want - so guess what happens more often. The best you can hope for in these cases is that you end up with all the graphics at the right resolution and things spelt correctly without Comic Sans.

As for commenting myself I try to be as polite as possible, sometimes even not saying things I mean in order not to offend. While not quite “if you can’t say anything good…”, you’ve at least got a chance of getting your point across.

Through lack of sleep (24 hours, sheesh) - but my morning cup of tea is making a noise. A sort or electronic bell ring, barely audible, which has now slowed down and sounds like a bell ringing at a deserted train station in a windswept American film. I’m going to drink it and hope it stops.

You see this headline: Tube network crippled by strike and you don’t think London, you think online flash-based video sharing.