Hey Guys,

Unfortunately with our last release, and its instability, we were forced to roll back releases. Unfortunately in doing so, it would seem that our notification system has been broken somehow. Our engineers are working on this issue as quickly as possible. We hope to have a patch within the next day, so we can deploy our code and fix the notification system at the same time. Please bare with us.

Currently all notifications are being queued up so they can be processed as soon as the fix is pushed and verified to be working correctly.

Thank you,

A shiny new spot under the nostril, when you have a heavy cold (or other sinus-affecting condition).

Is it just me, or are the people I know seemingly posting a LOT less than, say, 12 months ago? You? Any thoughts about this?

The long-continued use of tea has a distinct effect upon the character. This has been too often noticed and remarked to be questioned. There are tea-sots in every great charitable institution - particularly those for the maintenance of the aged. Their symptoms are generally mental irritability, muscular tremors and sleeplessness. The following is an account of one of the cases observed. The immediate effects upon him are as follows: In about ten minutes the face becomes flushed, the whole body feels warm and heated and a sort of intellectual intoxication comes on, much the same in character, it would seem, as that which occurs in the rarefied air of a mountain. He feels elated, exhilarated, troubles and cares vanish, everything seems bright and cheerful, his body feels light and elastic, his mind clear, his ideas abundant, vivid and flowing fluently into words. At the end of an hour's tasting a slight reaction begins to set in; some headache comes on, the face feels wrinkled and shrivelled, particularly about the eyes, which also get dark under the lids. At the end of two hours this reaction becomes firmly established, the flushed warm feeling has passed off, the hands and feet are cold, a nervous tremor comes on, accompanied with great mental depression. And he is now so excitable that every noise startles him; he is in a state of complete unrest; he can neither walk nor sit down, owing to his mental condition, and he settles into complete gloom. Copious and frequent urinations are always present, as also certain dyspeptic symptoms, such as eructations of wind, sour taste, and others. His mental condition in peculiar. He lives in a state of dread that some accident may happen to him; in the omnibus fears a collision; crossing the street, fears that he will be crushed by passing teams; walking on the sidewalks, fears that a sign may falls, or watches the eaves of houses, thinking that a brick may fall down and kill him; under the apprehension that every dog he meets is going to bite the calves of his legs, he carries an umbrella in all weathers as a defence against such an attack.

- At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien

In the absence of actual content (or tiresome self-despairing emo), have a list! These are where I'd do all my Wobsmas shopping if I weren't actually likely to spend all my money on books for myself. Er, like I did the other weekend.

They're practically all within walking distance of my office. So don't get me wrong, local bookshops are great, and I'd generally prefer them if I were living near one (Review in Peckham is my closest, and it's nice, but tiny). Pages in Lower Clapton, or Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, or Joseph's in Temple Fortune, or Owl Bookshop in Kilburn, or the one in Stoke Newington &c &c &c, but the ones listed below are all ones which are somewhat more comprehensive.

My Favourite London Bookshops (not second-hand)

1. John Sandoe Books (10 Blacklands Terrace, SW3 2SP, website). Okay, this place is lovely and is exactly the kind of thing I'd want as my local bookshop. Sadly it is only a local bookshop for incredibly rich people what can afford to live in Chelsea, and you will overhear quite a few of them with their plummy accents pop by and have a natter with the shop assistants at any given time you might visit. But this is lovely because it is what a bookshop should be. There are piles of books everywhere. The fiction upstairs is on shelves, but in front of them are two more layers of shelves on little rails which you have to heft aside to get to the books behind. Then there are further piles on every surface. The stairs are so narrow I'd be surprised there weren't serious accidents on a regular basis (esp going down to the children's section; poetry is also downstairs, of which they have a huge amount), but they've still managed to cram piles of books along the side of them. And they don't stock any marketing or business books whatsofvckingever.

2. London Review Bookshop (14 Bury Place, WC1A 2JL, website). If you want to find a novel by a slightly obscure writer who just isn't stocked anywhere else, this is the first place to look, generally. If you want to come across something random that's cool, come here too. If you want coffee and a cake, also v good. If you don't want to spend all your money, don't come here.

3. Daunt Books (83 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, website). There are a few branches of this one, but the one on Marylebone High St is the one to go to. Aside from the extensive selection, they also have a huge multi-level space out the back where fiction, non-fiction, travel and maps are organised by country. It's great. Also friendly.

4. Foyle's (113-119 Charing Cross Road, WC2H 0EB, website). Oh, you all know Foyle's, come on. Their smaller branches are kinda beside the point, though the one on the South Bank can be useful since there's very little else to do there except eat food, but they stock a lot.

5. Stanford's (12-14 Long Acre, WC2E 9LP, website). My interest in this one is not really technically the books, it's the maps. Obviously. The many many many lovely maps. Maps. Mmmm, maps. Especially the ones in the basement (London).

Feel free to hit me up with your own favourites.

Yes, I too have resorted to posting Tweets.
( Tweets )Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Last week's wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey episode of Misfits got a lot of love from the papers. And yes, it was gripping and well-acted and all that - but it was also fundamentally flawed, because they cheated. ( spoilers )

I've not updated with anything in the diaristic line in a week, have I? And even though that week included Robin Ince hosting Bright Club: Space, and establishing that the Shaftesbury is a perfectly acceptable local pub in spite of my failure ever to have had a drink there before, and was generally fairly entertaining, I still somehow feel none of it quite makes for Content. Except the final Poptimism of the noughties, perhaps, which did as good a job as can be done of summing up a very fractured decade in pop - I think Girls Aloud got more tracks played than any other band, which is only right and proper. Though clearly there were always going to be omissions; walking to my bus stop after, the South Bank skaters were pulling stunts to N*E*R*D and I thought, oh yeah, we didn't get them. But how can I complain when I got to dance to 'The Thong Song' while wearing a Green Lantern ring? Yes, I really am that cool.

Oops. Well, I've been largely off LJ again, so here's my brief entry for now to keep things ticking over. I know this one of the most adapted film clips ever, but it relates to my work well:

Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945

Thanks and happy Christmas to geeklite for the virtual snowflake cookie! It was a lovely surprise. Sparkly!

Hello! Tube Walks are still going over this cold season, and the next one is a relatively central walk in celebration of the holiday of Christmas.



It will be from Gloucester Road to High Street Kensington on Sunday 20 December 2009, with the usual 2pm (for 2:30pm) start. We'll do our best to avoid any clogged shopping thoroughfares, and maybe take a nice lope through scenic West London. Because the days are drawing in, it shouldn't be excessively long a walk, though.

Hope to see you there!

It was busy! This weekend I:

- went to see Gary Numan; actually that was on Thursday evening but no matter. It was great – there were four people playing synthesizers! And lots of middle-aged men in leather trenchcoats shouting “NUUUUU-MAN!”. He did ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ and it was amazing! He also dispensed with the synthesizers to go metal, which was less so. Beforehand, we went to Nandos and misterant demonstrated his amazing ability to magnetise forks.

- Watched the BBC Four documentary about Paul Morley learning to compose classical music. Oh, he is so pretentious and earnest, and yet almost always right about everything! My favourite bit was when he said that the music he wanted to compose ought to be a reflection of himself, so it would be sad and melancholy. Then there were many shots of him listening to music while looking sad and melancholy. He wore a duffle coat throughout the entire two-part programme. I want him to be my friend.

- Went to Poptimism. All the Poptimists are still lovely. Singing along to 'American Boy' with hoshuteki and pretending to be Estelle and Kanye is still fun.

- Did some top-notch walking and queuing with Kevan, during which I tested out the City of Westminster’s text service which locates your nearest public toilet, and discovered that it always knew where I was. I haven’t decided whether this is helpful or sinister.

- Went to North London in order to sit in a pub with roz_mcclure and do High School Musical quizzes. While waiting for her in Archway station, Paul Morley WALKED RIGHT PAST ME!!!!

- Made a fairly poor fist of partying with the New Zealand Goths, and an even worse one at getting home again. It turns out that South London is not very close to North London.

- Saw the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy. Looking at the huge lump of wax being pushed through the archways in the gallery, and the big yellow concave wall, and at people looking at themselves in the strangely-shaped mirrored objects, made me feel extraordinarily happy.

- Was more successful at partying with the New Zealand Goths in honour of the baby Goth’s first birthday. He is pretty great and battled through his cold in order to entertain his guests by chewing on their iPhones. I also paid a visit to Action Cat, who immediately came and sat on me.

Life is interesting! Tomorrow pink_weasel and I are going to see Shakin’ Stevens, although he has such a reputation for grumpiness these days that I bet he won’t sing ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’ at all! My plan to leave all my Christmas shopping until 23rd December won’t backfire at any point, will it?

Judith has been sying 'ngry' (hungry or thirsty) and 'sblas sblas' (splash splash) already, but there's never been a moment shen she's obviously said it for the first time, more that they've become things in her speech that we understand.

Well, today she pointed at the fruit bowl and said 'bear'! (She meant pear, I don't keep bears in my fruit bowl.) First time she's tried to use my languae anddefinitely succeeded.

Somewhere on the internet is a website dedicated to highlighting how few women there are in films. It has a sliding scale of involvement, something like 'no female characters, one female character, two or more but they do't talk to each other, two or more but they only talk to each other about a man, two or more and they have entirely independant conversation'. it's not a complete list of non-sexist films, but it's quite interesting.

Do any of you know what I'm talking about and have the link?

I really haven't been doing very much. I do update my status on Facebook. Does that count? (oh, if anyone here isn't friends with me there but wants to be, let me know)

Aliza will be THREE next month, which is impossible, right? This can't be!

We're going to Neil's parents for New Years (we saved $800 by flying the day after Christmas, instead of going for Christmas week).

Found today, in my garden, after cutting back the olive tree and brambles [that had obviously shielded this strawberry plant form the two frosts last week] I found these strawberry flowers. I'll be keeping an eye on them to see if they produce fruit.



I fully expect a global warming denier to insist that fresh strawberries were a traditional Anglo-Saxon dish at Christmas feasts...

I was the last person likely to express the sentiments cited in the piece.

Hmm. That's not my recollection of John Bercow's reputation in the early eighties. While we're on the BBC news website:

Rowan Williams said the move raised "very serious questions"

Maybe it's time the C of E decided on the answers to some of those serious questions? Just a thought.

Don't worry, it's still the same number and everything (comment her if you don't have my number and want it). What this does mean is that, hopefully (Orange's server problems notwithstanding), I should be easier to contact now.

Questions:

1) How can I attach things to the emails I send from my gmail account on the phone? Photos are the obvious things in question.

2) Attempting to follow Dreamwidth's instructions for posting from email (tested from laptop, not phone) didn't work - what am I doing wrong?

3) Should I join Spotify and pay £10 a month for the premium service, so I can listen to even more music anywhere? braisedbywolves was recommending it and I like the concept, but it is MOAR MONEY. And phone memory.

but I'm retiring to my spartan room with my book, some chocolate, maybe music, and definitely a bottle of something strange and Lithuanian. I've had enough of the biting cold, the lack of dinner, oh and people not replying to texts when I miss them. Oh yeah and I still haven't slept since Sat, and I'm probably looking at 7:00 breakfast so I can squeeze travelling in. That's 5:00 in uk money, folks. Sleep soon is justified!

I HAVE ANOTHER 'COLD', WHICH MAKES IT ABOUT THE THIRD IN 4 WEEKS.

I'M SNEEZING, COUGHING, TIRED, DISORIENTATED AND HAVE A POUNDING HEADACHE.

TUESDAY IS MY LAST DAY OF TERM. I *STILL* HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE TO START MY ESSAY, BECAUSE I CAN BARELY FOCUS ON THE SCREEN.

REALLY, REALLY, REALLY FUCKING TIRED OF THIS NOW. MAKE IT STOP.

Far too quiet out there for any haranguing and pontificating, what with the major news items of the day being the rather open-and-shut Knox case and Amir Khan's demolition of a tomato can in Newcastle last night, neither of which are worth commenting upon even in the most cursory manner. Anyway I'm not in the mood because it's Sunday and I've spent most of the morning bringing a colleague's recalcitrant Dell laptop back to life, which wasn't as easy as I first thought but it's now purring. So this afternoon, my plans are to eat the roast dinner that I have in the oven, and then to do as little as possible for the rest of the day. Yes, even I switch off very occasionally. Now I'm sure you were all dying to know that; such excitement!

Anyway, have a food-related poll. Having seen something relating to one of the denizens of the pedants' hellhole that was demon.local on LDV[1], and finding it thoroughly in character for someone from there (back in t' day, exposure to five minutes of d.l was like being attacked by Lady Isobel Barnett and Eleanor Summerfield with sharpened knitting needles), I couldn't help but resurrect a topic that used to get mentioned quite a bit on usenet back in the days before the everlasting September;

Poll #1495251 You want scraps with that, love?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 67

Two slices of potato, with fish sandwiched inbetween and then battered. What's it called?

Okay, what do you call fish mashed up with potato and covered in breadcrumbs?

What kind of fish do they sell in your local fish and chip shops?

And in lieu of original content, have some gratuitous Noosha Fox. Just because. The more I look at her, the more I think our Noosha is, in fact, Alison Goldfrapp's mad auntie that she keeps locked in the attic.



[1] - I'm hoping our friend with the bike is not on the shortlist to succeed David Howarth as Cambridge's MP! But someone will be soon; how far-fetched is this speculation that it might be Sandi Toksvig (hooray!) or Saint Shami the Self-Righteous (groan). I've never trusted any candidate with a background at Liberty/NCCL, given their invariable drone-like illiberal behaviour every time they've been elected. Talking of illiberal drones, you can't help but laugh at the predicament that the former member for StepfordPeterborough now finds herself in. Ah, diddums.

Yesterday, I went with a friend to see Speaking in Tongues at the Duke of York's Theatre. It was very good, in pretty much every way. It is a new play, with a well-written script that touches on a lot of themes. It's a play on which you have to concentrate, because it doesn't repeat anything and if you miss something you are lost. It's clever, and has an opening scene to each act in which two actors say the same things at the same time for some minutes, sometimes meaning the same thing and sometimes meaning something totally different. This is mostly very well done, although the length of it in Act 1 became a little gimmicky for me. It's very tightly directed and performed. It's a very good production - I especially liked the way in which, in Act 1, it represented a hotel bedroom, two different bars, and two different sitting rooms, with very little in the way of scene changes.

I think my only complaint would be the fact that the Duke of York's theatre, which I hadn't been to before, really suffers badly from audible tube noise - although in Act 1 this happened to occur only in one set, and I actually thought that it was an ambient sound effect :-)

The play is primarily about marriages and about the concepts of fidelity and betrayal in relationships. It touches on peoples' need to be valued, on the importance of communication, and on people getting over things and moving on. It's funny, insightful, and realistic - the dialogue is mostly believable.
The first half of Act 1 is entirely about four people - two married couples - who all love their spouses and yet still want something more, want to be desired by other people and perhaps to sleep with other people. That they are all feeling the same, and that they are all convinced that it is wrong, is perhaps the best argument that I've seen for polyamory.....

Anyway. A good play, only on for another week. I recommend it.

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I guess it all starts when somebody, somewhere, decides that their council-supplied wheelie-bin would be really useful for some other purpose than collecting rubbish. Then they have no bin for their waste. If they are sufficiently anti-social (and somebody, somewhere in each neighbourhood, is), they simply steal somebody else's, and then paint their house's number on it.



Then somebody else has no bin. So they steal somebody else's. And it turns into a suburban sliding-puzzle game. Eventually, it leads into me waking up yesterday morning to find that our recycling bin has gone. It is unlabelled, and looks like all the other recycling bins in the borough (except for those that their "owners" have labelled). This is most annoying. We have done nothing wrong, and yet we are unable to recycle. I will call the council tomorrow, but I'm fairly sure that they would charge us for a replacement - even though it is not our fault that we do not have one any more. The only logical thing to do, as pointed out by my housemates, is to steal somebody else's and paint our house's number on it...

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From booklectic, this is really horribly racist.

So far today, I

• woke up annoying early, read for a bit, then dozed most of the morning away


• had a deep & meaningful discussion


• travelled to the Beak St mailbox via Oxford Circus and Regent St, which was a big mistake - Regent St was closed to cars and jammed full of people


• struggled back home with a giant bag of film mail, and Jubilee line delays


• set off again for the Strand mailbox, arriving minutes before they closed


• got home and had dinner and a sit-down, and planned stuff with Col


• got on the PC to book my hotel for tomorrow night (abandoned, prices differ and the cheapest confirms after 1 working day... just going to rock up at the hotel and try my luck!), and look up travel between Kaunas, Šiauliai (for the Hill of Crosses) and Klaipėda - I'm still confused, it kinda looks like while I can do it in a day on the trains, which appear to be cheaper, I can't make it to Klaipėda in time for Col's arrival at the hotel. Maybe it works on the bus instead? Maybe I just need to ask at the hotel instead, or the tourist info... or abandon the idea of stopping off... or something.


• listened to lots of Dizzee Rascal and Wiley on Spotify, which made me giggle.

I guess I should actually go and pack now, right?
And later on I should do some processing of all that mail, which should in turn take me nicely to my 04:00 departure time (bus to Liverpool St, train to Stansted, plane to Kaunas).

I'll be back on Wednesday night :-)

On with the daily question:

Day 04 - Your favourite book
These don't get any easier, do they?
Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff, then.

Day 05 - Your favourite quote
Uh, I don't really do quotes... tho those by Mae West, and Dorothy Parker, often amuse me.

Day 06 - Whatever tickles your fancy
???
OK then, 6th Dec is St Nicholas Day in Germany (and Holland), so polish your boots and put them outside your door, you might get them filled with sweets and little gifts if you've been good all year.
Don't blame me though if you get nothing - you haven't been good! At least you've now got clean boots, though, right?

Eep I am quite tired now. Hmmm. Food, and coffee, and packing. Yes.

Am exhausted now. Bedtime!

I didn't walk a terrific distance today - it is three miles up Dovedale from the car park to Milldale and (obviously) another three back again - but I'm feeling pleasantly stretched. Tired because of exercise, not because of the weather and illness. I think the last time I was there was with my parents maybe fifteen or twenty years ago.



I'd forgotten how lovely it is, even at this time of year - it is probably the most popular place in the peak district for a reason, after all. Saw maybe a dozen dippers on that three mile stretch, one on the way back caught a fish of an impressive size for such a small bird. A couple of grey wagtails, wrens, a heron, and a crowd of bolshie ducks at Milldale who trod on my feet and pecked at my rucksack as I ate lunch.



On the way back I noticed tree stumps and fallen logs with coins hammered in to them - I had walked past them oblivious on the way up, too busy looking across the river. All modern coins - there are old wishing trees, but there also seems to be a modern craze for hammering coins into trees. I sat on a rock and read Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Burial.

That they buried a peece of money with them as a Fee of the Elysian Ferry-Man, was a practise full of folly. But the ancient custome of placing coynes in considerable Urnes, and the present practise of burying medals in the Noble Foundations of Europe, are laudable wayes of historicall discoveries, in actions, persons, Chronologies; and posterity will applaud them.

I wonder if future archaeologists will discover coin-studded logs and what they will make of them if they do? Browne earlier mentions the tomb of Childeric, discovered at Tournai three years before he wrote, and the three hundred golden bees which were part of the treasure buried with him in the fifth century. Only two now exist, after thieves stole the lot and melted almost all of it down in 1831. The two remaining bees survived because they were thrown into the river.

Back in the halcyon days of the 1990s, oh best beloveds, I was really rather fond of Polly Toynbee. She seemed, to my dewy-eyed young self, to represent both a political approach and a level of career success which was morally intelligible and even admirable. Polly, I thought, could at least be relied upon to call it like she saw it, and I had a reasonable level of confidence that how she saw it might not be a million miles from how it was.

The gilt really started coming off the gingerbread for me in 2001, when she didn't take quite the stance about Bush I was expecting, and especially when she, along with the rest of the moderately left-wing press in Britain were either gung-ho or shockingly silent about the realities of terrorism and war in Afghanistan. That was the year she wrote the essay for which she was nominated as 'Islamophobic Journalist Of The Year' by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, in the rather bizarre company of Melanie Phillips, Nicky Campbell & Robert Kilroy-Silk. In fairness, it was quite appropriate that she didn't win and Melanie did, and I am not wholly convinced about some of the points made by the IHRC, but in relation to that article, they certainly had a point. Something isn't absolved from prejudice just its author says it isn't prejudice - some people would argue quite the opposite.

So, I had pretty much fallen out of love with many of the prominent journalists of the time, and Polly was certainly among them - I'd stopped buying newspapers and spent a lot of time frothing. But there's no doubt she'd continued to do some good and worthwhile stuff along the way, and 'Hard Work' (her UK response to Ehrenreich's seminal 'Nickel & Dimed') did mollify me quite a bit. After all, it's reasonable to expect her to be both firmer and clearer of UK rather than international politics - isn't it?

Except that her infuriating tub-Thumping for Labour became increasingly shrill and deluded, despite the ever-more-obvious culpability. I'd hesitate to say that it's now hit the bottom with a resounding thump, but yesterday's article was, if not by any means a new low, certainly pitched at a boggling level of illogic. In acknowledging Labour's total failure on even the subjects about which she has been so exercised (namely, the increase in poverty and particularly child poverty), she is nevertheless still trying to convince us that the Tories would have been, and will be, even worse (possible, certainly, although speculative), and that we should therefore vote for Labour to ensure that the Tories don't get in. This is frankly barking, and her complete lack of interest in, say, suggesting we look to other political parties instead, just shows how hopelessly blinkered she is on this subject. When she talks about Tory intentions to reduce public sector monitoring, she almost makes me - me! - contemplate voting Tory for a whole 3 seconds, so I really have to wonder about the impact that would have on a less virulently anti-Tory voter. Probably the opposite of her intended outcome, anyway. Clearly, she failed to read, or at east to comprehend, either the experience of public sector workers or the chilling chapter "Government, The Hard Taskmaster", in her almost-protege Madeleine Bunting's explicitly-acknowledged 'Hard Work' follow-up, 'Willing Slaves'. Boggle.

If anything, Polly's relationship with the Labour Party seems to have followed a trajectory not wholly dissimilar from that of a victim of domestic abuse. Yes, it's all hearts and flowers and joy in the beginning, and the little warning signs can easily be overlooked. And before you know it, she's claiming all their morally dubious actions are entirely justified. OK, maybe they overreacted a bit, but you have to understand, they were just responding to a perceived threat. Entirely reasonable. And look, they're trying. They can change! Well, even if they can't change, the alternative would still be worse. Meanwhile, most sane observers mutter, "Why doesn't she just leave?". The braver ones tell her that there are safe place, places people like her can go, and try to send her leaflets about the Lib Dem conference, but she won't listen.

It's not so much enraging as it is tragic. I'm not sure I can bear to be Polly's enabler any more. I no longer believe she can end this doomed relationship, so I suppose the least I can do is try not to give it an audience. When she wants help, she knows where to find it.

Perhaps those so inclined might like to offer a winterval prayer for Polly, that the scales might fall from her eyes and she can free herself from the death grip of this passion-spent habit. Poor woman.

Some time ago I had a week off, and since Simon had been busy designing fonts, ended up doing some of the same, continuing a project I think I must have started in about 1997. It's now in some sense finished, and even has a proper Web page.

<http://bjh21.me.uk/bedstead/>

I've also drawn a graph that I find very difficult to explain, so I'll just say:

<http://bjh21.me.uk/denom/>

Ivy the cat, my room, 5 minutes ago:

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...and Ms Sherlock calls me! Wheeee! Psychic connection, mental telepathy, beep-beep! And lovely news it is. She and her fiance have finally booked a date for their wedding, next August (yes, lesbians and filthy bisexualists *can* find true love together), and she wanted to ask me if I could eat any of the foods the caterers have offered! Awwwwww. It was weird timing, cos I'd JUST got all my contacts back and had put her on the list of people to call over the weekend. Anyway, it was all good, I got to hear about their long-awaited cat and the tedium of property sales. Now I have to figure out what we should be getting them as a wedding gift. Stumped! Suggestions? They already have quite a lot of furniture, I believe, as they're amalgamating their existing households.

This week has been somewhat heavy going, and last night was slightly hellish as I was alone in the house. Not as bad as usual, but the sleeping-alone problem isn't going away, and I'm feeling quite sick this morning because of how little sleep I got. I don't really know how to fix this. I just CANNOT sleep on my own in a place. This is a real PITA, and is very disruptive. Still, I had a bunch of films from the library, but instead I spent my time texting and chatting and listening to music. Bit upset to miss the last Poptimism of the decade, but I was physically shattered and filthy and carrying a load of heavy bags, so just going home seemed sensible.

There was a mysterious box outside our front door when I got in, but I was too tired to go and look at it. Wonder what it is.

EDIT: Really *must* stop spending so much time reading hilarious/tragic back posts on Joe. My. God's blog. Current favourite quote, about the gayest moment ever: "I did cocaine in a South Beach disco with Grace Jones while a drunken drag queen wrote "LOVE ME" on my back in lipstick, while the Village People were on stage performing YMCA. I had on combat boots and daisy dukes. My chest was shaven.". However, 'Tripping Over The Tubs', 'The East Bay Mind Fuck' and the frankly disturbing 'Worst. Sex. Ever' [NB Story talks about (consensual) rape fantasy role-play, don't read if that's not what you want to laugh about.] have me in stitches no matter how often I read them. Oh, I do so sympathise with the top apathy - urgh, they want me to read their minds and pretend how into their tedious elusive kink I am? I just want to hit something! - sadism FTW.

I think maybe I should eat something. And have a bath.

I haven't done a links post for a while. I don't have a lot to share, but a few things that interested/amused me lately.

• A long but interesting interview with one of the people responsible for designing the proposed (but disliked by the current administration) US nuclear waste depository under Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Just how do you design something to last a million years? You certainly have to consider a lot of stuff that you don't in other circumstances. For example, Sweden is putting their similar store under the seabed of the Baltic... but they are aware, and are having to deal with the fact, that after the next ice age that seabed could be farmable land[1], and somebody could dig a well in it. This is a shorter read, also interesting but less discerning, talking about how to design warning notices ("Do not dig here") that last and can be understoood for as long as possible. There is also content about this in the main interview, which notes that the current thinking is to design for 10,000 years, and hope that whoever is around when the warnings start to disappear (through physical processes or through language / culture / species changes) will see fit to renew them.
• Here is a brief comic which may amuse my design-y friends, web-based and otherwise, and any other contractors to a lesser extent - "How a Web Design Goes Straight To Hell".
• I want one of these. Yes, it's sort of tacky (the all-white-light version less so), but it's very cool. I don't know how dark the room has to be for it to work well, and... well, it's $65 and only currently available in kit form, and my poor soldering skills would probably wreck it.

[1] I'm not sure of the mechanism for this... but even if this example is rubbish, the point stands about long-term planning.

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I'd resolved that now that I wasn't working, I should try pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone a little.

Well, on Thursday night I tried role-playing in Call of Cthulu for the first time, thanks to an excellent and gentle GM and my housemates. It was...weird, and I can't quite decide whether or not I liked it. I had no trouble in imagining how a character would behave, but I found it difficult to actually role-play him. I've never been an actor, I know this. Given his backstory, his actions ended up a bit wrong - he behaved more as I would have done in the circumstances, not as he would. Or, perhaps, as I would have done when playing a Lucasarts adventure! It's something I shall try a bit more, and see whether I grow to like it more.

Yesterday, with the help of prolificdiarist, I persuaded myself to sign up to volunteer for Crisis at Christmas. I'm not sure why this scares me as much as it does.... but it seems like a good thing to do.

Original post | comment(s) | Reply? | Instructions for the confused

Guido Fawkes slags off John Bercow for writing a nasty-sounding sex tip guide in the 80s. Which, fine, no problem. (Edit: Ugh, was that ambiguous? I mean that I'm fine with Fawkes slagging off Bercow, not that I'm fine with what Bercow wrote in the 80s.)

Then he implies that he once slept with Bercow’s wife. Which seems a nasty thing to say on the country’s most widely read political blog. (If he was just saying it to his mates, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.)

I’m not sure it should seem a nasty thing to say. Views?

I know very little about Sally Bercow, but very well done to her for unashamedly admitting to having had casual sex in her 20s. She says that her drinking got out of control, but she doesn't express any regret for having one-night stands:

She also had a number of "flings", saying: "It's true that I would end up sometimes at a bar and someone would send a drink over, and I'd think, 'Why not?' and we'd go home together. I liked the excitement of not knowing how a night was going to end. It was all very ladette – work hard, play hard."

I like this particularly because female promiscuity is often treated with disgust - a guy at my work said the other day, in a horrified tone of voice, that he knew "some girls who'll spread their legs for anyone".

I keep wanting to write more updates, but my brain is mostly full of howling noise rather than actual words. I don't really know how to represent that on the page. I've just forgotten what I was going to say when I started writing this! So maybe I should stop.

[ Not on Dreamwidth as I couldn't log in . Am I so fried I'm forgetting my passwords now?]

FAO lolliepopp (via zoomusicgirl )

http://heritage.scotsman.com/news-in-pictures/Picture-Great-White-shark-mauled.5771461.jp