The suicide rate among young men in England and Wales is at the lowest level for 30 years, say researchers.

One key factor has been a cut in toxins in vehicle exhaust fumes because of catalytic converters - making it harder for people to kill themselves.

So basically, they’re saying that there’s been a reduction in the suicide rate because people who want to commit suicide are lazy?

Everyone loves David Duchovny. How could you not? He’s that guy that used to do Red Shoe Diaries, which wasn’t really porn at all but still made you feel uncomfortable all over if your mum caught you sneaking downstairs to watch Bravo at 11pm.

Maybe that’s just me.

Still need to fix the mod_rewrite stuff though. Slicehost are awesome.

Edit: Score!

I have failed to ever understand why people download music from iTunes. I can kind of understand that it’s more convenient, particularly when you’re filling up your iPod, to just click “Store” and then “Buy track” (after you’ve waited 5 minutes for the store to load… seriously, Apple, procuring the urine!?). However, no other product in the known universe is accepted on the Internet at lower standards than in real life.

Let’s take, for the sake of example, a 1963 Pontiac Tempest with positraction (or a 1964 Buick Skylark which does not have positraction). It’s a feat of American Engineering, taking years to design and produce by one or more engineers and designers. The manufacturing process it taken out of the equation since it doesn’t really apply here. Conventional commerce dictates that if you are intending to buy such a car, you go to a car lot that contains many different types of car and check out the one that you’re buying. You check the tyres, the colour, how it feels to sit inside it. When you’re satisfied, you part with your well earned cash to a licensed vendor and drive the car away, there and then (or wait a week or so for your insurance to come through, I guess, but my point is that applies to any car purchase).

Now let’s imagine that you, instead, blinded by the lights of new technology, purchase your car from an online retailer that specialises in designing and building roads, which we will call iVroom. Looking past the fact that the retailer’s main line of business is designing and building roads, they have a good reputation and you’re confident in the validity of your online purchase. Millions of others are doing it and you’re told every day that the car salesman industry is dying; soon you won’t be able to buy your car from a lot anymore. iVroom even allows you to have a short test drive of your car before you buy, which is nice of them. You find a faded green 1963 Pontiac Tempest and a faded green 1964 Buick Skylark, just like there was from the blood and guts retailer. You decide you’d like to buy the 1963 Pontiac Tempest, you’ve test drove it for a bit and it feels almost the same.

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Firstly, I read reddit. This would be all fine and fantastic if only all of the stuff that’s annoying and incomprehensible on there went away. I click the RSS feed about once an hour and see what’s near the top; occasionally it’ll be something exciting - a new Javascript library or an awesome movie showing a program that can erase people from image and change the image dimensions whilst maintaining the aspect ratio of its subjects.

Reddit is full of the type of programmers who love to hack things in and write code that only they can read. This probably comes from when they were in school and they passed secret notes in a secret language between themselves and their invisible best friends who lived under their desk. We shall these programmers wankers, and we shall call these secret languages Lisp, or Haskell, or Erlang, or Smalltalk.

Yes, it is possibly the case (at least with Lisp or Haskell) that these are not programming languages at all, they are crazy functional weirdities that use arrows and feel way too much like IBM’s delve into formal with Z. My programs should not look like weird arrows with boxes and big characters that have two diagonal parts for some bizarre reason. However, my biggest gripe isn’t that these languages exist, it’s that people digg reddit up the most unbelievable shite.

Let’s take a typical example from today. Someone posted onto reddit a Haskell implementation of a regular expressions thingamajig from a C book - the C code was 23 lines and the Haskell code was 13 lines.

Who gives a shit? The Haskell code is completely frigging unreadable (this is the fixed version, btw, not the original that didn’t work), is a bundle of arrows and random characters, and doesn’t fucking work! If it did entire regular expressions in 15 lines, then yeah, that’s impressive, but why would I care less? Most importantly, why has this been redditted up to the top of my RSS feed? I hate you guys. Get the fuck out.

More importantly, everyone who is shitting themselves with glee over Python and Ruby and proclaiming it to be the scalable, wonderful language to protect the innocents from the threat of persecution, get out. Python and all it’s many bastard children is a TERRIBLE language, with loose horrible constructs that make me beg and plead to be writing Javascript or PHP instead where at least you can read the code and it makes sense. Any language that promotes the idea that every method which would normally have a void return type should return the object so you can chain 400 fucking methods together to get all your code on one line… GASH OFF.

That is all.

Tomorrow: Why I hate cures for cancer and fluffy kittens

Anyway, so, Jason Bourne. He’s a special old chap, he’s got amnesia and a penchant for getting the women he loves killed. An assassin by the CIA who has a change of heart when ordered to kill a deposed African dictator, Bourne is basically the best of the best when it comes to evading, killing and running.

To sum up the first two films, he gets amnesia, falls in love with a girl who helps him escape, they run away to India and then she gets sniped instead of him. He gets mad, the original head honchos behind the Treadstone project get their comeuppance and Bourne continues to struggle to find his true identity.

The basis of the third film basically continues straight on, but plot is kinda irrelevant when set against a backdrop of awesome. The rule of thumb is that all cars should fly at the camera no matter what’s happening on film, all jumps should be just about makable at any height and everything should explode. Straight out of the Live Free and Die Hard school of car chases as well.

Anyway, it’s awesome, go see. Also awesome this year were Die Hard 4.0 and Transformers, so go see them too.

And manly was what it was, more than anything else. 300 couldn’t be any more man even if it had Michael Caine with a sawn off shotgun chasing Vinnie Jones in expensive sports cars whilst simultaneously being fellated by five gorgeous supermodels from every continent on the planet, wearing only a loin cloth.

This isn’t a bad thing. Manly, homoerotic films have always been fantastic. Let’s look at the ultimate manly homoerotic film as an example, Top Gun. Top Gun is about big planes whooshing about and shooting each other, whilst seducing and eventually sexing Kelly McGillis to within an inch of her life. In the meantime, though, I’m going to play beach volleyball completely unnecessarily with Val Kilmer; sheer writing genius. Then they kill a load of Rushkies and celebrate with a beer before sulking in a bar listening to crap old love songs.

What Top Gun didn’t have though? Spears! Swords! Shields! Elephants! Drugged up adolescent girls with their nipples out! A giant rhino! A human throne! Good lord, that film rocked so hard. Of course, swords are to films as chainsaw bayonets (and ninjas) are to video games - the more unnecessary they are, the better it is.

Basically, the Trungalow is three guys who live together in a big three-storey house. Trungalow came from the fact that two of us used to live in a bungalow, and now live in a three-storey house, so tri-ungalow… trungalow. Although that doesn’t make much sense, because it’d imply that bungalow comes from bi-ungalow, which would be two floors, so it should be quangalow? Quangalow is an awesome word, but unfortunately it’s pretty out of context and is just really stupid. I’m not even sure what the hell I was thinking.

Anyway, we got our aerial fixed in the house! This is a good thing as we haven’t had any TV for about three weeks and Hollyoaks is like crack so the cold turkey has been hellish. I find myself wandering the streets of Warwick and Leamington at night, looking through windows of department stores in an effort to watch Tom. I want O.B.! Yeah, shut up you little twat. One day he’ll get a pool ball in a sock, one day.