"POOH'S GRAND ADVENTURE: THE SEARCH FOR CHRISTOHPER ROBIN -
An awful new installment into the Winnie The Pooh series is
just a waste of time. Christopher Robin heads off to
school, but the nieve [sic] bear thinks that he has gone
missing, so he gathers his friends (all of which have seem
to become more obnoxious), and heads out on a quest to find
him. Stick to the older cartoons. 1/5."
- another scathing critique from kids' movie newsletter
ENTERTAINMENT ONLINE
>> MINOR HAPPENINGS <<
major overkill
Yes, the whole world mourned at a senseless tragedy that
could so easily have been averted, but that's enough about
APPLE's acquisition of Mac-cloner POWER COMPUTING...
seriously, Di's death seems to have got quite a lot of
coverage ("a real JFK moment... almost on the scale of the
Challenger space shuttle blowing up", wrote one clearly
moved NTK reader), and the British public showed its sorrow
the only way it knows how - by forming enormous 14-hour
queues... some branches of Tesco thoughtfully offered in-
store books of condolence, presumably so you could get your
mourning at the same time as your groceries but, on the
net, it's a much finer line between public grief and just
cashing in (http://www.haveyoursay.beeb.com/special/ - see
the threads "An American Poet Pays His Respects" and, for
some kind of perspective, "Totally Over the Top")... of
course, as the apparent causes were *so* suspiciously
obvious (The Independent juxtaposed "Net Users Quick To
React To News Of Diana's Death" with a link to an online
breathalyser), there was immediate speculation in many new
newsgroups, including alt.conspiracy.princess-diana,
uk.current-events.princess-diana, alt.princess.di.di.die,
and alt.sex.necrophilia.royal-family... the grassiest
knolls included "Di was the new Jesus-Messiah", "Di was
offed by the UK's ailing florist industry", or even "in
collaboration with the millionaire Al-Fayeds, she faked her
death then went into hiding on the recently repaired Mir
space station, where, Moonraker-style, she and Dodi plan to
re-populate the earth with their shyly beautiful Eloi-like
aristocratic offspring"... bonus of that last one is the
extra claim that the body in the car "wasn't Di at all",
but merely "one of Rory Bremner's uncannily accurate
impersonations"... well, you can dream, can't you?...
http://cnn.com/WORLD/9709/02/internet.conspiracy.reut/
- warns that "most [Di theories] are morbid and many
probably wrong." They're not called CNN for nothing...
http://www.navigation-station.com/princess-diana-conspiracy.htm
- make mine a "landmine"
IN OTHER NEWS... well, the official position is of course
that there was no other news, enabling us to overlook the
rumoured demise of DEFOREST KELLEY (he's probably fine,
could just be obit writers wanting to use the line "It's
worse than that, he's *dead*, Jim") - oh, and the Algerian
government doesn't seem to done anything about the 300
inhabitants of Rais slaughtered in bed using axes... on the
tech front, US lawyers OPPEDAHL & LARSON are suing other
law companies who apparently nick their potential customers
by putting the words "Oppedahl & Larson" into META tags for
their rival pages so they pop up first on search engines.
We say, good for O&L, as their page (http://www.patents.com)
contains some of the rawest HTML we've seen for a long
time. At least, we *assume* it's their page... LYCOS claim
to have patented the web spider, but still, they let
www.lycos.co.uk slip through their fingers, didn't they?...
3DFX finally get around to suing SEGA for breach of
contract (obviously the first share price tumble wasn't
enough, they now want to get *completely* squished)... oh,
and for a positive spin on APPLE buys POWER, try
www.macosrumors.com, which *still* manages to be
pointlessly optimistic whatever happens. Hell, Cupertino
could get nuked and they'd see it as a brave new dawn for
Apple to geographically decentralise...
>> TINY ANTI-NEWS <<
oh, you've heard
In fact, this week's main Anti-News is that someone sent me
some really good stuff, but I've left it on my other server
- curse my failing memory... otherwise, it's business (or
should that be 'anti-business'?) as usual: www.msnbc.com
relaunches... apparently condolences of online celebs go
straight to the tops of the lists... TOTALLY LIVE NEWS (at
http://MusicCentral.msn.com) claims to be "relaunching", then
completely disappears... folks at last getting wise to GOOD
NEWS and its mutations - if only they'd do something about
those bloody DARWIN AWARDS... rivalling even "Shamen To
Release New Single On Internet" comes Anti-News classic #2:
"New COLDCUT Album To Feature Interactive CD-ROM"...
MACROMEDIA fiddled results to boost shares... COMPUSERVE
currently still up for sale...
>> MICRO CULTURE <<
stay in your homes
Lots of stuff cancelled, including the KLF gig (till mid-
October), though they have set up a premium phone line on
0890 900 2000 for "people having problems dealing with the
millennium"... US cable network ROMANCE CLASSIC pulled a
touring competition for a pair of Diana's gowns purchased
at an auction at Christie's. The tour was called "A Dress
To Di For"... Heinz's WEIGHT WATCHERS division was just too
late for the direct mail part of its new campaign featuring
Sarah Ferguson and the line: "It's the hardest thing,
staying on a diet - harder than outrunning paparazzi"...
just to end on an up note, The Daily Star's SEGA BABES
promotion (page 3 girls dress as your favourite Virtua
Fighter characters) has only been "postponed" till 15/09/97
>> TEENY TRACKING <<
guest edited by Yoz Grahame, Perl fan
<FROTH> PERL! perl perl perl perl... O'Reilly have taken over
www.perl.com from Tom Christiansen (the Son in the Holy
Trinity) and made it actually look nice, as well as getting the
Perl evangelism truck moving more (http://republic.perl.com/
... at last, a usable logo!), shoving out a load more Perl
books (more bibles!) but the best is the whizzy new Perl-to-
Java compiler that will be coming out this autumn in the Perl
Resource Kit (http://perl.ora.com/), furthering the work of the
bizarrely-named-and-mad-with-it Alligator Descartes
(http://perl-conf.songline.com/cgi-bin/p/guest.pl?x-a=v&x-
id=419), which is mainly to get back at all those Java
programmers who complain that Perl scripts look like you've
opened a binary by accident - and then go on to write CGI
"Servlets" that look like this:
http://jserv.javasoft.com/products/java-server/
webserver/fcs/doc/servlets/sa mple.html#600
- I mean, look at it! You could do it in 4 lines! </FROTH>
MACQUAKE did actually make it to the shops due to MacSoft
picking up the baton from the late Lion Software; so go
download the demo and play with the load of freebie MacQuake
editors that have already come out. Still, the source code *is*
pretty much freely available now - since Sega bought up
exclusive rights for the Saturn, it looks unlikely there'll be
an official Quake on the PlayStation (the platform of the
people!). But we reckon it's just a matter of time till some
hardcore console hacker knocks together their own dev kit and
brings the public what the publishers cannot...
http://www.brutality.com/macquake/
- c'mon, design some skins for the "Power Computing" clan
http://box.argonet.co.uk/users/jgrant/qd/quake.htm
- it's Quake - but on the Amiga!
>> KIDDIES MEMEPOOL <<
don't have ideas - they'll have you
Is free health education CD-ROM D-CODE just YOU DON'T
KNOW JACK - *on drugs*?... new-look PENTHOUSE "not bad at
all"... AI gets creative at www.imagination-engines.com
(what, again?) - not to be confused with real tech at
www.rocketusa.com ... PRIVATE EYE very good on Diana thing
this week... the guy who killed Lord British in the ULTIMA
ONLINE beta only did what anyone else would have, ie didn't
report the bug, but ran around manically killing for all
the points he could get... JAMES CAMERON to do TRUE LIES 2
before TERMINATOR 3... www.tired.co.uk to relauch -
proprietor STEVE BOWBRICK claims *he* originated variant
"Nasty, British and Short"... win B'OMARR MONK in quiz at
www.starwars.hasbro.com ... email tmail.xxxxxxx@uk.tobit.com
with sinister text in message body, and where xxxx is the
phone number of your most technophobic friend...
>> MO' MEDIA <<
different time-slot
TV>> it's going crazy here, so first, some of the bizarre
schedule changes from last week. The curse of Airplane 2
struck again (last time it was due to be on, there was a
plane crash), Lethal Weapon 3 was replaced by Field Of
Dreams, Channel 4 pulled Rocko's Modern Life, and, more
intriguingly, both a Sherlock Holmes film and Sergeant
Bilko early in the week were "not the episodes advertised".
A reader writes: "The potentially distressing sight, for
example, of Lionel Atwill as Moriarty heading a Nazi spy
ring dedicated to air-bombing London, was replaced with the
soothing tale of a family systematically wiped out by
needles thrust between the base of the skull and the second
verterbra and up into the brain." Weirdest of all, however,
was probably Sky editing just the word "paparazzi" from the
Rosebud episode of The Simpsons. Sensitive or what?
aaaaanyway, this week, don't hold out too much hope for
Friday's actually quite fun FREEJACK (it starts with a car
crash), though, ironically, they probably will show pseudo
techno thriller VR5 (11.15pm, Fri, BBC2), which is
rubbish... the lethal Saturday evening double death blow of
GLADIATORS and BLIND DATE now must now wait till next
weekend, probably ditto the ITV Sat films ANGEL OF DEATH
and THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE... by way of prescient
tribute to the (probably still alive) DeForest Kelley, John
Peel repeats Trek songs and spoofs in TREKNOLOGY (6.45pm,
Mon, BBC2), while EQUINOX moves to a new slot (9pm, Mon,
C4), and this week looks at black holesssssssdgfasgf... oh,
sorry, dropped off for a moment there...
FILMS>> quirky Bette Midler romantic comedy THAT OLD
FEELING was pulled for featuring an annoying photographer
(no, really), but there's still MRS BROWN (not, we were
disappointed to learn, a Somewhere In Time-style romance
about Queen Victoria falling in love with the Billy
Connolly of 100 years in the future), nice-but-dull legal
thriller NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN, or (our pick of the
week), AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY - the
usual spot-on Mike Myers spoofery, could do with more Mimi
Rogers (and less Liz Hurley), good in parts, but ultimately
suggests that Mike's never seen Casino Royale - or maybe
seen it *far too many times*...
GAMES>> be interesting to see if they still release the
astonishingly violent Chase HQ-style driving frenzy RAY
TRACERS (Taito, PlayStation), or try and postpone it to
take out the concrete pillars... the less emotionally
hyperstable may prefer hauntingly beautiful trad two-player
top-view shoot-'em-up RAYSTORM (again Taito, PlayStation),
or much-needed trucks-and-destruction action from BLAST
CORPS (N64)... releases are now picking up after a slow
summer, so also watch for LOST WORLD (EA, PlayStation),
SONIC JAM (Sega, Saturn), or, for real old-schoolers, GAME
& WATCH GALLERY (Nintendo, Gameboy)...
[Thanks to this week's special contributors: Y Grahame,
J Nash, H Jones and 'Mil'. OK, right, what if Di was
killed by a cabal of professional skeptics? You see, a
month or so ago, the tabloids were full of psychics'
supposed 'predictions' about the future for her and Dodi,
and none of them - *none of them* - came up with anything
like this - surely, the sort of thing that any half decent
'psychic' might have spotted...]
>> SMALL PRINT <<
Need to Know is (usually!) an interesting UK digest of things that
happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it
on Friday or print it out then take it home if you have
nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from their evil minds.
It is registered at the Post Office as "truth hurts, don't it?".
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
Archive - http://www.spesh.com/cgi-bin/now
Excuses - http://www.spesh.com/ntk
Unsubscribe? Mail majordomo@flirble.org with 'unsubscribe ntknow'.
Subscribe? Mail majordomo@flirble.org with 'subscribe ntknow'.
NTK is helped by VIRGIN MEDIA, VENUS INTERNET and UNFORTU.NET.
They worry about us, but we don't worry about them.
(K) 1997 Special Projects. Non-biz copying ok, but retain SMALL PRINT.
Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com.