The people at Irn Bru have caused another stir with a new billboard advert.

The poster shows a young girl wearing a bikini next to the slogan “I never knew four-and-a-half inches could give so much pleasure”.

I spent yesterday afternoon at The 25th Marshall Street Open, with my cousins and some friends.

The Marshall Street Open is an annual amateur golf tournament that has been running since 1978, which started as a knockabout among friends around the local grass parks with some junior golf clubs and progressed to municipal and private courses.

Every year, the players gather to compete for the Marshall Street Open title, and the temporary ownership of a famous wooden-handled 2-iron club that once belonged in a (long disbanded) junior half-set.

It was a great day out, and the weather stayed sunny too.

I caddied for one of my oldest friends, Brian Hamill, and we had as much of a laugh wandering around the golf course as we did taking part in the tournament.

In the end, John McCormack was declared the winner at the 18th, and we went back the Monkland Bar for a 25th Anniversary party.

I’m thinking of getting in some practice and taking part next year.

Here’s some photographs of the day:

John Conaghan dishes out the tournament odds

Brian Hamill tees off at the 1st

John Conaghan’s ancient set of clubs

Brian Hamill at the 18th

John McCormack makes his final putt

Last year’s winner, Gordon Cunningham with his runner-up prize

Tony McBride wins £10 for the lucky twos

John McCormack is presented with his trophy and the famous 2-iron

I found out about BitPass, a micropayment system, from Acts of Volition (a very good site that I visit regularly, but due to downright laziness, have never added to my recommended links. Ed. – I have now).

The idea of BitPass is simple; you sign up and recieve a username + password, then you buy some ‘credits’ with a standard credit card – a bit like a pre-paid mobile phone.

Every time you visit a site that requires a micropayment, you enter your BitPass username and password, and a little chunk of your pre-paid credits are depleted.

The converse is also true; if you own a site that offers pay-for content via the BitPass system, you earn money every time someone accesses your site using their BitPass username + password.

It means that you don’t have to pay for an expensive yearly/monthly subscription to a site that you might not visit every day of the week – and you only pay for the content you view.

At the moment only a few sites are signed up to the beta version, but it could catch on.

Guardian Unlimited, take note.

Check out this truly brilliant Flash movie, called Karma Ghost, which won the Audience Award at the Sundance Online Film Festival 2002.

Via Kottke’s Remaindered links.

The suggestion that the world would be ever likely to forget the suffering caused in events like World War I, annoys the shit out of me.

Only recently, BBCi decided to invest heavily in a Friends Reunited-style website designed to keep war veterans in touch with each other and share their stories of suffering with the rest of us.

The hugely expensive project (still in development) was launched at a time when the New Media division of the BBC introduced huge cutbacks in staffing numbers, and arrived about two years after the Friends Reunited phneomenon had done the rounds.

When I questioned this decision among my work colleagues, I was lambasted by all and sundry.

Their arguments were all based on the sentimental notion of preservation for nothing more than the sake of it.

My own criticism was not about the website itself, but against the overall concept of creating an extensive service to serve a dwindling audience – especially so where such facilities already exist in a more official (and more accurate) historical record-keeping capacity.

However, what I got was ‘Lest we forget, and all that’.

This idiotic attitude suggests that the failure to create a BBC rememberance website (or any other public forum for documenting these ‘stories’) would result in some weird form of amnesia that would spread insipiently across the globe and erase all documented history in relation to these events.

Of course it’s sad that the remaining survivors of these events are dwindling, but I simply cannot understand the panic to preserve individual stories that the majority of the world will never see anyway and which are difficult to corroborate at the best of times, never mind in an open, public forum like the internet.

Let history speak for itself, I say.

Which it usually does.

Wouldn’t it be good if eBay had a ‘wanted’ section?

You know, where I could post requests for things I would like to see put up for auction.

Wanted: Nokia 8110 battery, etc. etc.

It could then email me when items I’ve requested appear on the site for auction.

Perhaps it has, and I just haven’t found it yet.

Sure, I know I can save certain searches and receive email notifications – but it only informs me of those items when someone puts one up for sale.

Also, if there was a generic list of ‘wanted’ items (or structured categories of items) that I could browse through, I might notice some things listed that I currently own and could be doing with getting rid of.

On Thursday 19, December, 2002, Richard Massey, a 27-year-old computer programmer from Ascot in England went out to his work in Manhattan, New York.

He was never seen again.

On Monday 21 July 2003, Dr Richard Stevens, a 54-year-old consultant haematologist working at Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital in Pendlebury, England, drove to work, parked his car in the car park and walked to his office, where he left his jacket over the back of his chair.

He has not been seen since.

Only recently, I finally got around to taking a look at Scaryduck, the weblog that won The Guardian’s much-maligned ‘Best British Blog‘ competition last year.

And, well, it’s not that good.

I honestly can’t see why it was ever chosen as the winner.

It’s not particularly well designed, it isn’t terribly funny, and it took ages to download.

So much for that, then.