Sally Vicker’s first novel apparently caused a bit of a stir, although I don’t recall hearing about it myself. It’s a pleasant read, very gentle but not to the point of being boring; the characterisation of the heroine is strong, and she carries the story over a couple of bumps that a lesser creation would trip up on. I found the conclusion a bit unsatisfying, but not to the point of spoiling the entire book. Assuming that the reader can swallow stories incorporating angels and suchlike phenomena as pivotal plot devices, it’s worth a read.
5 comments 2006-11-30 12:04 Categories: Books, Reviews
Whilst we’re on the subject of pestering politicians, I’m pleased to see that the government seems to be trying to make it easier for us to try to knock them back in line, online, by “signing” petitions at:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/.
I’m less overwhelmed with glee that the most popular petition so far is for repealing the ban on fox-hunting, as if our elected representatives haven’t wasted enough time and effort on the dratted thing already.
The second most popular is a petition against the proposed introduction of ID cards. Everyone who isn’t John Reid should sign it. ID card legislation is an even more stupid waste of time and money than both fox-hunting and the ban thereof combined, and it’s considerably more dangerous to boot.
0 comments 2006-11-28 13:10 Categories: Politics, Rage
First time I’ve ever done that, with the exception of a couple of organised pro-forma postcard things.
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6 comments 2006-11-27 13:07 Categories: Politics, Rage, Science & Maths
I went to see Alan Bennett’s The History Boys at the Lowry on Friday. It was really quite good, but not as brilliant as I had been led to believe it might be. It is very enjoyable to watch, engaging and funny, but, as usual with these things, the hype is bigger than the thing hyped. And I don’t think it’s down to the cast or staging or anything like that. I’m just not convinced that Bennett’s play is quite as amazing as everyone makes out.
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4 comments 2006-11-27 11:22 Categories: Reviews, Words
As you can see, I’ve made myself a Wordpress theme.
I built it from scratch, more or less, so it’s missing loads of crucial features. Because of this I’m not going to make it available for anyone else to use yet. Also, I am fully aware that it’s a bit boring. That’s intentional. I’m keeping it as simple as I can because most of the themes I’ve looked at are rather complicated, and full of features that tend to get in the way more than they help anyone. And I like boring, boring is readable.
I shall keep adding things as ideas occur to me, though, so I’m sure it’ll develop into an illegible mess in no time.
0 comments 2006-11-24 15:01 Categories: Blogkeeping
These are fantastic! The Space Invaders ones are clearly the best, but I like the Pong designs as well. 100% Merino too. Brilliant.
1 comment 2006-11-23 10:45 Categories: Consumerism, Geek Stuff
My brother Dave is back in the UK from Canada at the moment, and on Sunday we met up with him and his girlfriend, Mel. They live and work in Whistler, B.C., in the Canadian Rockies, a part of the world that presents its residents with a number of interesting and novel ways of meeting an untimely death; one of the more famous of these is the local bear population.
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5 comments 2006-11-21 20:56 Categories: Miscellaneous
This WTF makes me feel much better about the time I accidentally typed ‘rm -rf *’ in the live directory of kittenwar.com and deleted the entire site.
4 comments 2006-11-17 10:31 Categories: Computers
I have the supposedly undesirable habit of persistently using the word “less” where “fewer” would be more “correct”, and I am regularly chastised for it by certain individuals. It would appear, however, that I’m not actually as wrong as I have been led to believe: according to this interesting Language Log post on the less/fewer “rule” “less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted.” (my emphasis). Hooray! Another silly prescriptivist rule I can gleefully ignore.
And you know those notices at supermarket checkouts that say “5 items or less”, heralding the impending collapse of civilisation with their abuse of the English language? They’re not actually Portents Of The Ungrammatical End Of Days; they are, in fact, perfectly correct.
2 comments 2006-11-16 13:37 Categories: Words