Wings Over Scotland

Ooh, things just got even more interesting. Viewers following the mysterious tale of Benchmark Reviews and where their fully independent reviews come from will recall that WoSblog's shadowy agents tracked down the text of their glowing review of a $1200 office chair to the website of an online retailer called Smart Furniture. When asked, Smart Furniture asserted that the text was their own original work.

Since then, further developments have transpired. Read on!

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Ooh, this gets better and better. Viewers who've been following the thrilling story as it develops will recall the eerie similarity between the content of the Benchmarks Review feature on the Herman Miller Embody chair, and the advertising blurb for it on the site of retailer Smart Furniture.

We were a little curious about this, bearing in mind site owner Olin Coles' strident assertion that, apart from the belatedly-acknowledged passages copied from Herman Miller's press release, "the remaining 99.9% of the article is a fully independent review of a self-purchased product."

(Actually it's the remaining 93.6%, but let's not quibble.)

So inestimable Friend Of WoSblog John X dropped Smart Furniture a line.

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Wow. I got home from a poker game in the early hours of this morning, and idly wondered if busted shill/"executive editor" Olin Coles might have replied to my polite request for his side of the story with regard to his hopelessly dishonest excuse for a website. What I found was that Mr Coles had instead chosen to post on the Benchmark Reviews forum, in a thread entitled "Forever banned: Hall of Shame". The thread describes itself thus:

"Like any writer, our work comes under fire from time to time. Most of the criticism is taken to heart and used to improve future work, but occasionally the critic can go overboard and begin making personal threats and accusations. This thread is intended to show our visitors that their accusations and threats do not remain anonymous."

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WoSblog is internationally renowned for its psychiatric expertise, so I wasn't surprised yesterday when a viewer of the WoS Forum asked me, quite out of the blue, to assess their mental stability.

"I want to know if I'm going barmy", wrote the clearly-distressed reader, whose cause for doubting his very sanity was – of all things – a review of an incredibly expensive office chair.

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If you're a member of WoSblog's highly secretive Alert Viewers Society, you might recall that WoSblog recently visited the intriguing city of Gloucester, and in passing mentioned the presence  – on the menu of the Varsity Bar pub chain – of an item by the name of the Dirty Dog's Dinner.

It didn't seem fair, though, that WoSblog's beloved viewers should be expected to simply picture it in their minds. So here it is.

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Anyone who's been reading WoS or WoSblog for any amount of time will probably already have noticed that I have very little time for videogames that want to tell stories.

There are plenty of fields of culture available already for people who want to be told stories. Books, films, comics, TV,  theatre and even music are all ideally suited to story-telling, and frequently do a brilliant job of it. You wouldn't hire a footballer to come round and do your plumbing, so why would you look to videogames for storytelling?

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Chatting to a chum yesterday, something they said gave me cause to recall a feature from Amiga Power in which former full-time members of the AP team recounted their experiences on leaving the mag for the “real” world.

Sadly the issue in question (AP54, October 1995) is one of those that still hasn’t been scanned for the Amiga Magazine Rack, and only a fragment of it is available in the WoS Archive, so I had to go and get the actual magazine off my shelves, like some sort of caveman.

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This is totally NSFW, if you’re a dragonfly. It may also cause depression among male viewers. If you’re absolutely sure you can handle XXX-rated dragonfly action, then click on the pleasant picture below to peek through the leafy window and into the dragonfly boudoir.

(Pics taken this afternoon in the botanical gardens of Victoria Park, Bath, with a Fuji Finepix F70 EXR compact digital camera.)

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If a week is a long time in politics, 26 months is forever, right?

“This talk of alliances comes up a lot, doesn’t it? Everyone wants
to be in our gang. So I want to make something very clear today.

Will I ever join a Conservative government? No.

Will I ever join a Labour government? No.

I will never allow the Liberal Democrats to be a mere annex to
another party’s agenda.”

– Nick Clegg’s first speech as leader to the Lib Dem conference, March 2008

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We're almost done with the politics stuff, viewers. Normal WoSblog service will be resumed shortly, but first I thought I might as well share with you an email I received this morning.

Back on Monday, when uncertainty still ruled as to who'd be forming the next government, the website 38 Degrees invited its users to send emergency emails to Labour MPs, urging them not to block any potential "progressive alliance" by vowing to vote against electoral reform, as many threatened to.

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to write anything today.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8676607.stm

The momentum behind a Lib-Lab coalition seems at the time of writing to be slipping away, as one braindead Labour MP or grandee after another comes out to argue against it in front of an eager media. If Labour's 1983 election manifesto was the longest suicide note in history, today's collected BBC News interviews could be among the shortest.

Because here's what happens if Labour retards like David Blunkett, John Reid, Tom Harris and Wee Dougie Alexander scupper this agreement.

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