What ho, stout traveller! Think you’ve read everything there is to read on the internet? Rubbish! Here’s a list of links that keeps me amused all the live-long day. Some are perennial favourites, some one-off del.icio.us bookmark scraping, a couple are probably NSFW but all are at least mildly diverting. Have fun.

spEak You’re bRanes If you don’t know about this site — which comments on the braindibble left behind by the Great British Public™ on the BBC’s Have Your Say pages — go and visit it now. I guarantee it will take forty minutes out of your life. Read the archives too.

Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles [NSFW, kinda] A filthy comic strip about a foul teddy bear.

Top 10 TED Talks Not, as someone dear to me thought, ten talks by a man called Ted, but the most-viewed short videos from the TED conferences. Go and watch Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight which I only recently saw even though it’s been doing the rounds on t’internet for ever; I’d be fascinated to see if the kind of disconnected young people we pin so many of society’s ills on would be able to point and laugh at a woman in such an odd emotional state, given her utter conviction. Mathemagic is cool too, and the colour-changing octopus in David Gallo’s talk is mesmerising.

Fazed Slightly pot-luck-ey, given that you don’t really know what each link is, but it’s usually worth clicking on.

Digg Folks knock Digg, but poking around the front page usually throws up at least one link that’s worth your while. Also try the Upcoming page so you can be ahead of the curve and say “oh, yeah, I saw that yesterday; good, isn’t it?” with conviction. This means ladies will want to have sex with you.

Wulffmorgenthaler [NSFW, kinda] Another ’toon strip. Of variable quality, but when it’s funny, it’s fu-neee.

xkcd After years of seeing occasional strips from this ’toon popping up all over the web, I decided to RSS the sucker. Very worthwhile, even if there’s a good 32% of the gags that go straight over my head.

Photoshop Disasters Wonder, as thousands of pounds-worth of cutting-edge hardware and software are wielded by chimps and fucktards.

The Big Picture I know, I know, everyone’s linking to it, but it is genuinely good; big pictures with usually very useful short captions.

ProCon Feeling virtuous after all that frippery? Go and read up on controversial subjects at ProCon.org.

I do, by the way, apologise for so much doggy nonsense on this blog, but the way I figure at least I’m posting something. Without our weekly walkies, this site would be terminal, and not in a Unix-ey kinda way.

Robbie — another Staffie since we find ourselves loving their compact, brassy charm — was a-dore-able. While for the first half of the walk he was all about the forward momentum, once he’d tired himself out a bit he became much more affectionate and would roll on his back to have his tummy tickled, submit to all sorts of velvety-wonton stroking, and even jump up next to me to have a cuddle when I sat on a log. He was the most outwardly affectionate of the dogs we’ve walked, and though he was happy to trot back into the home — and was delighted to see his carer again — when we walked away after giving him back, he tried to follow us. Bless.

He was a hugely muscled dog, and though small, he was capable of really tugging on the lead. His shoulder and hindquarters were just pure, solid muscle, of the kind that makes my flabby, sedentary body weep with jealousy.

In photography news, I need to start taking more control of shutter speeds. Lots of the shots I took today were too blurry, not because of ISO, aperture or available light but just because the camera was deciding that a slightly sluggish shutter would suffice. Tv mode needs more investigation, I feel. Some of the better shots are up on Flickr.

Yes, Gabriella was foisted on us again today, looking more dishevelled than ever from rummaging about in the long grass. Every day is a bad hair day for Gabriella. She was joined by Titch, and seemed much more lively than she had been in Troy’s company. They were quite sweet as a couple, actually, with Titch refusing to walk on if Gabriella was busy engaged in some post-sniffing or grass-munching.

The damp weather doesn’t auger well for this evening’s Crowded House gig at the Arboretum, but it did give me the opportunity to take some pretty, pre-release-Leopard-default-desktop-rip-off photos of dew on grass; download a desktop picture pack, here, licensed as . Lots more pictures of the dogs too, as always, on Flickr.

I am, I freely confess, addicted to the vignette effect I slap onto all* my photographs, but I don’t like the canned effect you get with CS2’s Lens Correction filter. All hail, then, Vignette 2.0, Receding Hairline’s latest tutorial! Oh, and the Digg badge here links directly to the tutorial page, not this blog entry; get Diggin’!

* I am often lazy, however, and just Lens Correction it. I suck.

Or: Take two dogs into the shower? A moment of heart-stopping panic today when Troy (left) slipped his harness and went careering into an adjoining woodland; we could only hear him rustling around in the undergrowth. Just as I was about to call the home and tell them we’d lost one of their dogs, he popped his head up further along the wall and Jenny dropped everything – including Gabriella’s lead – and harnessed him back up again. Gabriella, bless her, just sort of stood there looking on and occasionally munching grass; no mad dash for freedom for her.

Troy’s boisterous-yet-lovable nature – he slipped his harness a second time, and was a wilful little bugger – led us to christen him Oliver Reed, and Gabriella’s grizzled old lady looks earned her the name of Elaine Paige. The naming-of-random-animals-that-don’t-belong-to-us continues.

Left my 400D in the office on Friday, so pictures are courtesy of my PowerShot S70; found it more difficult to process the RAW images to give me a pleasing finished image than with the 400D, and I’m still not entirely happy with the finished result. It’s a bit flat. Hey ho.

The perfect magazine, for me, should be just like a roast chicken* – bear with me on this, and excuse the crunching gears of metaphor and reality.

• There should be a real feeling of anticipation before you begin reading.
• You should be excited about getting started on a nice bit of breast – the big main coverfeature that attracted you to the magazine. And it should be mighty satisfying...
• ...but there should also be delicious legs and wings – smaller features that are just as delicious as the main ones but that you didn’t necessarily buy the chicken for.
• And even when you think you’ve finished, there should be a few little regular treats – the oysters, say, or bit of crispy skin – that you tend to forget about before you actually start eating the chicken, but that when you remember about, you’re really glad the chicken’s, um, editor, implemented them some years ago.
• Even then – after the breasts, legs, oysters, skin and everything else have been eaten – there’s still some enjoyable picking to be done. Captions to be read, sidebars to be enjoyed, letter to be read; that sort of thing.

I think that I should start an editorial and management consultancy course where I espose various ‘x-as-x’ food-based analogies for every kind of product imaginable. Except food, which I would of course compare to magazines, cars and luxury cosmetics. Who’s with me?

* Assumes you like chicken, and that, like me, you’re a breast man.

Ladies and gennelmen, the pride of the 9-year old me: a Legoland (Denmark) driving licence. The look of glum, detached resignation on my face belies how pant-wettingly exciting it was for me to drive a tiny, blocky electric car around a fake road system, stopping for red lights like a good little Scandinavian.

Today, we walked a greyhound. I say ‘walked’. I mean ‘stood in close proximity to while she rolled around in the grass and snuffled into the undergrowth’. It was ironic that of all the dogs we’ve walked, the greyhound’s circuit took by far the longest thanks to Nelly’s insistence on flopping her butt down with a thump and rolling around in the long grass.

She clearly hated the kennels, and for the first time we felt oddly guilty about handing a dog back to the (very nice) staff. The other dogs we’ve walked seemed to have a pretty stoic attitude – “OK, well, thanks for that walk, friends; no hard feelings OK? I’ll just be here in this cage if you need me...” – but we really got the impression from Nelly that every time she gets taken out for a walk, she hopes she’ll never be taken back; we felt like we’d betrayed her just a little.

In the last month, Receding Hairline has had visitors from 148 countries, including countries I blush to confess I hadn’t even heard of. (Kyrgyzstan? New Caledonia?)

This is by way of being a completely manufactured introduction to a rather pretty little question that formed in my head the other day: what accent do people ‘do’ when they do an accent of your country?

Let me give you an example: when people do a Scottish accent, chances are it’s going to be a Glaswegian, or at least broadly-west-coast-of-Scotland accent. I blame the big yin. And so I’m imagining that when people do a generic American (Cope, I’m looking at you) accent, it’s usually specific to a city or at least region of the States. Ditto for Welsh (you saw that coming, huh?), Irish (Susan?), German and so on.

So given that I have so many international visitors, I’m hoping y’all will oblige me in letting me know in the comments what city or region tends to define the accent that represents your country when people do an impression of you and your compatriots talking. Rope in friends, enemies, colleagues and those with whom you have never worked before. I’ll do a special page somewhere on the site if I get enough responses.

A little guidance

1. It’s not about what accent actually is the most representative of your country; it’s about listening to the accent that people from outside your country ‘do’ when they’re being Scottish or French or whatever.
2. This is about national accents, not about ‘what people sound like who try to do a Brummie accent but fail’.
3. For a given value of ‘national’. In my world, ‘Welsh’ is national, rather than ‘British’. You decide.
4. This only really works in my mind with places where English is spoken natively, but I’m assuming the same will hold true for other major languages spoken in different countries. What does a Québécois think a Parisian sounds like doing an impression of a Québécois? Of course, I’d love to hear that British people speaking English with a mock German accent all sound Bavarian on whatever, so just have at it in the comments.

(The only one that I’m thinking is probably going to be difficult is ‘English’ itself. When I were a lad growing up in Scotland, an English accent was always an unbearably posh RP-meets-early-Queen-Elizabeth-II, but that was probably as much to do with a tiresome background anti-Englishness than any notion of a coherent English culture. But knock yourself out in the comments.)

It’s been a while since this site had a facelift, and in today’s style-obsessed culture “a while” is just far too long. So welcome one and welcome all to the pretty new Receding Hairline. With room for bigger pictures and some snazzy new styles for hyperlinks – dude, it took me a long time to work out how to do these; be impressed – the new style sheet is a personalised version of the new Caribou theme that ships with RapidWeaver 4.

It’s essentially certain that I will have broken some bits with the new style, so if you see anything particularly horrendous, please do let me know. I’ll also, when I get a sec, be going back through and reformatting my images for the slightly wider content area; I’m hoping RapidWeaver will be clever enough not to mark these as new entries in your RSS reader, but if you do start suddenly getting loads of ‘new’ stories popping up, again, let me know.