No, this isn’t a post about Allo Allo, just a collection of some rants I’ve seen on the net recently. We all love a good moan and here are some of the latest.

Warren Ellis took a well deserved shot at the inane celebrations of St Patrick’s Day by people who are not Irish. His Annual St Patrick’s Day Message is well worth a read.

Charlie Brooker loves a good moan too but in this article he stops for a moment just to watch the wonderful The Trap documentary by Adam Curtis. I’ve enjoyed the last two episodes and I hope he can knit it all together for Sunday’s final one.

I saw Casino Royale this week and though that Daniel Craig was a superb choice for James Bond. There are some people that disagree … a year before they saw the film. Their site is the imaginatively titled www.danielcraigisnotbond.com.

Julie Burchill has a good rant about my local council in Brighton & Hove. “Brighton Women’s Centre was shocked to find its modest annual funding had been slashed from £6,000 to a big fat zero. This at a time when the council could pocket £2m in parking fines in a six-month period without breaking sweat.” All this from her new book, Made In Brighton, coming soon.

What would make me moan? Possibly seeing this as I opened my door in the morning.

Lets all hope that West Ham manage to secure Matthew Upson from Birmingham by the end of the day. We need him. Oh, and Shawn Wright Phillips from Chelsea would be nice!

Thank you to Shilpa Shetty for galvanising the nation in its fight against bitchy z-list celebrities. And for the £30 I won from placing a small bet on you.

Down The Line - New BBC Radio 4 comedy from Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson and Simon Day.

The Kanardo Blog - An amazing collection of design, both web and print, from around the world. You can also check out Infosthetics which has a similar collection.

Smashing Telly - Want a new documentary TV channel? Check out Smashing Telly. This brings you all the best documentaries, films and shows that are available on the Internet.

Brilliant video of the Indo-Dutch rock and roll band The Tielman Brothers on Dutch TV from 1960.

Supermarket Monopoly. Board game with a difference.

The Bumper B3ta Book of Sick Jokes is now downloadable as a PDF. Warning! This contains some very sick humour and you could easily be sacked for looking at this. If you find offensive at anything then I wouldn’t take a look at this at all.

LA Muse - A new ongoinging online graphic novel by Adi Tantimedh and Hugu Petrus.

Running from Camera - Strange collection of photos featuring a man running from his camera.

17 days to go till the launch of the Nintendo Wii. Here’s a BBC article on the new console. Why not smash it up in front of all the other people queing for their new console, as can be seen at The Register. They did the same last week with thier new PS3.

Martina Topley-Bird - Soulfood (Charles Webster mix) mp3. A haunting house track I found on the web.

Presenting the new owner of West Ham United FC, Eggert Magnusson. There’s a great article about the takeover at the Telegraph.

Funny David Blaine parody on YouTube, contains swearing.

This is quite facinating.

Learn a little more about the geography of Iran for the upcoming strategic missile strikes with this handy BBC map.

Keeping with the politics: The American Empire for Dummies.

The athiest’s nightmare. God invented bananas for man as can be seen in this video. It’s so true. Where’s my nearest church? Quick!

I loved the KLF. And since their demise I haven’t really taken a big interest in pop music. You can check out their old videos at popjustice.com Absolutely amazing.

Today’s game: Keepy Uppy Tennis Ball. I managed 90 but the phone rang and put me off.

Stop buying Heat magazine. Get all your US celeb gossip and pictures from justjared.com

Snooker Update: O’Sullivan 5 - 3 Dott. Play resumes this afternoon.

So much has been going on recently. I’m working hard on a couple of web projects that would be finished by now if it wasn’t for Microsoft IIS and Internet Explorer being ‘different’ to the standards. Time to catch up on some posting.

First lets congratulate the Super Hammers for getting through to the FA Cup final and into Europe. With a not very convincing win over Middlesbrough we’ll now face the mighty Liverpool at Cardiff on the 13th of May. That will kick start two months of football madness as I attempt to watch every televised game in the World Cup.

I’ve put another bet on, my third this year. First I put £5 on Lyon (at 20/1) to win the Champions League but they got knocked out in the final minutes of their quarter-final game. Secondly was my big win on the Grand National. Last week I put £5 on Graham Dott to win the World Snooker Championship at 40/1. He needs to win 13 frames to get into the semis and yesterday at close of play he was 10-6 up but he’s currently at 12-11. Is the last minute knock-out about to happen to me again? I could do with another £200.

Brilliant Rolling Stone Magazine interview with Kiefer Sutherland star of 24. Which this season is back to its best.

Some online games. Give them a try:
Lemmings on your broswer.
3D Logic. Starts off easy but soon gets hard.

Great news: “a dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as little as 15 minutes. Women, according to one set of results, feel ‘genital warmth, tingling and throbbing’, not to mention ‘a strong desire to have sex’“. Old age isn’t looking so bad after all!

Oh, and hear what one of those middle of London street evangelists has to say over a coffee. Interview at b3ta.

SNOOKER UPDATE:
12-12 all, deciding frame. Dott 51 - 37 Robertson. So close. The games already been going on for 30 minutes.

SNOOKER UPDATE:
This is getting too intense. Robertson is now 23 behind with 18 on the table. He needs snookers. Come on Dott!!

SNOOKER UPDATE:
Excellent! The tiny Scot did it! He may have to beat Ronnie O’Sullivan to get to the final though so I can’t celebrate yet.

I’ve re-arranged the righthand column a little bit. You won’t have the animated Flickr java screen anymore, the new one just returns three random images. Gone is the Netsounds link. Unique Visitor statistics are still there (i broke the 20,000 individuals mark!). The Amazon link has been changed from The Comic Strip Presents box set to the new Crazy P album. And the ‘get Firefox’ badge has been made smaller. It should improve load times.

On the left we have the new Search Blog field. This does what it says on the tin. Visitors can use it to check out all the Real Hustle posts (so far this year 500 people have come here from typing “jessica-jane clement” into Google, although Google sometimes completely ignores me). Please let me know if you have any problems with it. The Blogroll bar has also been spring cleaned with a few removals and additions. Enjoy the new ones!

For the last 2 days I’ve been trying to get the wonderful php (which is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML) to talk to MySQL (the world’s most popular open source database) via IIS (Microsoft Internet Information Services).

Now if reading that hurts your head then you really should try installing them individually on your PC then get them to communicate to each other. Each one seemed to work on their own but they just wouldn’t call each other. I was up till 3:00 last night posting desperate questions on a number of forums, none of which were answered. Thank the lord for Google and the 10 scraps of highly scribbled on paper in front of me. I must have changed just the right one of over 100 configuration settings to finally get it to work this evening.

So now I’m having a nice cold beer and listening to some lovely minimal tech house downloaded from Brique Rouge to relax.

Today’s link: Screenshots of all the sound effects used in the old Batman TV Series.

I’ve been playing around with Flickr Mosaic. Top row are my photos - middle row are Mrs Pitt’s - and the last row are from some friends and contacts of mine.

1. Baby Graffiti, 2. Silver Globe at Blend, 3. West Pier 2, 4. Pole Dancer, 5. Just Married, 6. Royal Pavilion, 7. Hidden Lilly, 8. Barbelith, 9. Kent in May

I’ve been a bit flu’ed up this week so I’ve missed out on all the Russian love I normally get up to.