Ghastly Assemblage	Purist Revisionism
RSS	ATOM
WS-*	REST
HTML 4.0	XHTML 1.0 Strict
PL/SQL	HaskellDB
x86	PPC
Worse™	Better™

I was asking my son (Oliver, aged four and a half) recently about things that were real and things that were not real. He’s gone to the theatre today on a school trip to see a production called The Big Bad Wolf, and was reassuring us that the wolf was not real, just in the theatre.

Teletubbies, apparently, are real, but on television. This is true of everything that is on television, including cartoons. Television is its own reality. The penguin who slides down hills on his belly eating herring (Tux in Tuxracer) is real, but on the computer. Computers, also, are their own reality.

I didn’t ask whether a big bad wolf in a theatre on the computer would be real or not.

Oliver then suggested making a list of everything in the world, and putting a tick next to the things that were real and a cross next to the ones that weren’t. I wondered, to myself, about those that tremble as if they were mad…