A statue of Buddha built for a musical turned out to be so big that a partition wall had to be taken down to get it out of the door.

The 5m (16ft) gold-coloured figure could not be freed from the Drill Hall in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion.

• Who is doing the voiceover for the Kasabian ad on Spotify? It's doing my head in, I know that voice very well... (13:26:08)

• Oh yes- Love's Labours Lost is cast. I'm Ferdinand, King of Navarre. Big part. Catrin is Moth, which is quite a fun part. (21:44:35)
• Incredible match under the new roof. Amazing stuff. (21:41:52)

• @alecmuffett damn fine piece of work. He'll be missed. (15:34:54)
• Oh for pity's sake. Check out the headlines : http://www.teamtalk.com/ (15:30:42)
• Proust moment - listening to Thriller in the car on holiday in '83 in Devon while Mum and Dad went to get fish and chips. (08:34:12)
• RT @JonnyB - Very sad about Michael Jackson. HABITAT - for all your furniture needs - habitat.co.uk. (08:30:06)
• Sad about MJ but sadder about Steven Wells... (07:57:49)

• BBC: Wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said. (12:19:12)

When I was a boy I'd dream fragments of places, small and vivid. The seaside town in the valley, the labyrinth near its harbour. The north-facing cliff by the beach, shady and cool on the sunniest day. The marsh to the south, a long day's walk, bordered by three sandstone hills, the tops of which house mysteries. The village to the north, nestled on a ledge of the chalk cliffs, invisible from the road. Beyond the village, an indeterminacy of hills, and then a sunny archipelago.

As I grew older, I realised that these dreams were an analogue to the town where I lived. The geometry of the two map onto each other in a distorted way. The village to the north is the analogue of a real village - a narrow, ramshackle affair on the edge of a salt marsh, unlike the dream's cliffsedge perch; but the two share a spirit of isolation and a feeling of being overlooked. In the real world there is a plain to the south, not a marsh - but it, too, is bordered by a sudden hill.

The dreamscape is quite fixed; things never change. The sea is always in flood, but is always calm under a clear sky. The waves lap gently on the doorsteps of the tall, coloured houses on the promenade. The denizens of the town travel from house to house in painted rowing boats. Night sometimes falls, over the labyrinth and the narrow valley - absent from the real town - where the little houses crowd together; but it is always the same night, with the same warm breeze and campfires in the encircling hills.

The real town, like all reality, is in constant flux - people move away, people move in; shops open and close; buildings once thought a vital part of the shape of the place fall into dust and are forgotten. The reality is unfixed, while the dream endures.

Yesterday, they began to build a labyrinth by the harbour wall.

I've just found out that no only is the Bay closing, but it's closing with two days notice of closure and eviction, including gutting the place and dismissing all its staff. Bloody hell. You can go here and send Brains a comment if you like.

• Sod Holst, it's Ivor Cutler time. (11:15:33)
• According to chatter on the Book of Face, the Bay in Aberystwyth is closing! End of an era! (11:10:12)
• Listening to Holst on Spotify - though trying to find something that isn't the Planets is not easy. (09:08:19)

Via Alec, two bits of news on this venerable and insane operating system, which ran on GEC mainframes back from the late 70's through to the turn of the century, and was a part of UK Internet history.

Firstly, he's managed to get hold of an emulation of the bloody thing; and secondly, the Wikipedia page is under threat of deletion for non-notability. As Alec says, poppycock.

Although I never really poked around inside it, I recall its bizarre directory structure and its awesome command syntax: everything you did sounded like it was a command to launch the nuclear weapons from some 80's hacker movie. FCOPY USER SINK TRACE DESTROY for example, to delete all a users files (IIRC).

...may be often be insufferable, but his video review of Transformers 2 is genius.

• @ids - perhaps you have to Uplift your personal belongings. You know, bioengineer them into sentience. </scifigeek> (12:04:57)

Bugger the critically acclaimed scifi, he's the guy who's responsible for the ''robots.txt'' protocol to stop crawlers indexing marked websites:

During one of my periods of burn-out I decided to teach myself Perl. So I started by trying to write a web spider - a bot that did a depth-first traversal of the web, to retreive (and eventually index) what it found, or just to download pages (a la wget or curl). There weren't many resources for robot writers back then; the internet in the UK was pretty embryonic, too. (SCO EMEA had a 64K leased line in those days, shared between 200 people.) I was testing my spider and, absent-mindedly, gave it a wired-in starting URL. What I didn't realize was that I'd picked a bloody stupid place to start my test traversals from; a website on spiders, run from a server owned by a very small company - over a 14.4K leased line. I guess I'd unintentionally invented the denial of service attack! Martin, the guy who ran the web server, got in touch, and was most displeased. First, he told me to stop hammering his system - advice with which I hastily complied. Then he invented a standard procedure: when visiting a new system, look for a file called "robots.txt", parse it, and avoid any directories or files it lists. I think I may have written the first spider to obey the robots.txt protocol; I'm certainly the numpty who necessitated its invention. (You can find the evidence here (look for websnarf).)

This is from part five in an ongoing series on how he became a scifi author and got that weird CV.

• Nuanced car stickers: http://bit.ly/1qSyMv (14:21:49)
• Today's xkcd is classic. @alecmuffett, what's my Erdos number again? (08:38:12)

• My colleague is waxing lyrical on wheelbarrows - "We made the world with wheelbarrows! Seriously!" (16:48:26)

• Today, I am mostly doing rocket science by accident. (08:56:16)

• #iranelection Guardian liveblogging: http://bit.ly/p9cDZ (15:00:50)
• RT @GreatDismal I don't know about the revolution, but "the fog of war" will definitely be Twittered. (14:50:45)
• In honour of #bloomsday - The genius of Pitch'n'Putt with Joyce'n'Beckett. http://bit.ly/17xjFs (12:16:09)
• Confuse the iranian security forces - set your location to TEHRAN and your timezone to GMT +3.30. Might help, can't not. (10:48:39)

Looking out of the window, we saw two boats heading very fast directly towards Aberystwyth trailing a hell of a long wake. Binoculars showed no details (we're about half a mile from town here) but a gunmetal grey, so at home at lunchtime I popped down to the marina to make sure we weren't under TERRURIST ATTAK and took this rather uninformative snap (of Charger).

Turns out it was the two boats Charger and Smiter, both P2000 (Archer class) fast patrol vessels (and boy are they fast). They're used by the University Royal Navy Units of Liverpool and Glasgow Universities, to train up people who might want a job in the Navy after graduating.

Something I just learned - you know the tune Chopsticks? Well, if you ask an American and a Brit to hum it you'll get different tunes.

• @DrunkenBungle my wife's got the theme music somewhere. She finds it very amusing, for obvious reasons. (15:24:48)

• The #twitpocalypse killed twitterific. Damn. (14:47:42)

Bless him. Bloody brilliant. Also brilliant support act - the Alex Dingley band (with Swci Boscawen on keyboards. I thought it was her, not many people look like that). Another support act, Patrick "Nicky Wire's Brother" Jones. Er. Not so great.

• Listening to Neutral Milk Hotel, because Anne Frank should have been 80 today. (08:45:48)

From Geoff Ryman's 253:

The last of the laughing people leave. Anne Frank knows where they have gone; they have been selected. She knows who passenger 252 is. He is the officer who makes the lists. She goes up to him asks. "Would you like to dance?"

The officer looks up and says pleasantly. "No thank you."

"Why not?" she asks him. "We have so little time together."

He smiles. He loved the dance, but the more quickly he finishes this report now, the more time he will have to be himself.

Anne pleads. " This is a matter of life and death."

The train roars through the Elephant. All at once, the car collapses from one end, squeezed flat like a toothpaste tube someone has stepped on. Everything stops.

Sandwiched between metal, Anne seeps. Her arm pops back into its socket, her fingers flow back together. From between the torn sheets of metal, she pulls herself out of the car.

A bloodied hand offers her the list. She takes it. It is the list of useful people who will survive:

the unemployed
the sick
the retired and elderly
the mentally subnormal
prisoners
pre school infants
children driven to school
people with cars
housewives
nuns....

Anne knows such lists. She knows all the names, the millions of names. She catches up with Tom McHugh and takes hold of his hand. Together they walk up the tunnel.

Anne is murmuring the kaddish now, for the dead. She wanders and bears witness. She cannot forget them, nor can she die.

• And more big news in science - element 112 has been confirmed by IUPAC. Now ununbium gets a cool name. Any ideas? (22:01:53)
• Looks like Betelgeuse is on the way out http://bit.ly/8KDF4 (11:19:38)
• And back in the office... (08:57:21)

• Back from wedding in Cardiff and short break in London. Brain fused. Can't cope with bright lights of big city. This cave is nice. (18:52:56)

Part of the Pilot ACE, one of the first computers built in the UK, from designs by Turing.