Pick of the Week

“There are men who carry flaming barrels of tar through a Devon village, folk who pour cider over apple tree roots and cross-dressing troupes who perform something called Soul Caking to ward off evil spirits. There is also a village in Somerset called Hinton St George which has a tradition of pumpkin carving and night-time walks that sounds remarkably similar to the Halloween rituals we all know.”

“Unfortunately cats here are prized by Satanists who want to use them in seances and sacrifical rituals around Halloween … we tell callers no cats are given out from the middle of October to the middle of November … they never call back.”

“MEET Kelly Lee Dekay, 27, who has corset-trained her waist down to a tiny 16 INCHES in a bid to look like her favourite comic book idols. Kelly became obsessed with tight-lace corseting and incredibly shrunk her natural 30 inch waist by 12 inches in just six months. Growing up the fetish model fell in love with the hourglass look reading comic books and watching Haute Couture corsets on fashion runways.”

“The filmer begins to add commentary. It’s derogatory and even Not Safe For Work. The selfie-taker has no idea she’s being filmed. Would she care anyway? It’s hard to know. Her greater concern, having reached facial satisfaction, is to achieve a fine angle on her bottom. The filmer is aghast. Yet who is more absurd? The woman taking an age to take a selfie? Or the woman taking an age filming the woman taking an age to take a selfie?”

“Ross and Duval … created one of the world‘s first iconic cartoon characters, Ally Sloper, a rogue as famous in Victorian Britain as Dennis the Menace would be a century later. Ally Sloper was an urban antihero—a feckless shirker constantly escaping creditors.”

“In the meantime, the Web world must adjust to the differences between the two camps. The W3C, with a broader range of participants, uses a formally structured, deliberate process in which successions of drafts gradually become the final standards that released relatively infrequently. The WHATWG, born of browser makers’ cooperation when the W3C spurned their desire to improve HTML, produces a ‘living document’ that’s continuously updated with the latest features and bug fixes. Where the W3C’s standard is fixed and stable, the WHATWG’s is fluid.”