June 2011
20 posts
Badly Timed Advice
I was woken in the middle of the night by someone outside shouting:
“If you’re going to argue, go inside your flat! It’s three am; people are trying to sleep!”
Either I’d simply slept through the noise being made by the person on the receiving end of this rebuke or it wasn’t a rebuke at all, just some general advice bellowed into the wee small hours.
Maybe...
Pseudopath Test
I just finished reading @jonronson’s The Psychopath Test. It’s a book that’s fascinating and worrying in equal measure and with a strong identity of its own - there’s no way anyone on any of the sides portrayed in the book could possibly claim it’s propaganda for one of the other sides. It even calls into question the motivations of its author.
The only thing I...
55 foot long unidentifiable monster washes up on... →
Surely the DNA would give a clue?
Poor Little Skeleton
Such was my fear of skeletons as a child that I found the most frightening part of this book cover the skull in the corner:
In an attempt to disarm this terror I even went so far as to make up a rhyme about the picture in which I cast the skull as the victim:
I’m a poor little skeleton
All alone
And now I’m only
A piece of bone
BIG STONE FACE: And I’m going to eat him!...
Finger Tentacles →
Useful if you need to go to a fancy dress party as seafood (click title to go through to the pictures)
Sitcom Despair
It seemed to be something of a trope in 70s (and sometimes later) sitcoms that something was promised or was going to happen that would change the lives of the characters forever only to be snatched away at the last minute just before the end of the episode.
There was always a sense of genuine despair when this happened, the moral being “Don’t dream, you haven’t got a hope....
More leaking books
A couple of days ago I posted how a book I had just read was somehow responsible for blog entries I’d written before reading it.
Something similar has just happened.
Yesterday I had a slightly odd experience whereby a déjà vu I experienced was so strong that it actually contained the sensation of having had the déjà vu before as well. I even tweeted about it as it happened.
Then today...
Reading by Osmosis
As anyone who has seen my Twitter stream recently may remember, I have of late been reading and enjoying Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. Nearly finished it in fact which is a shame as I will be sad to leave that world.
One thing that struck me was how many topics I chose to blog about over the past couple of years concerning Many Worlds Theory, its relationship to quantum reality and how this is...
tentacular:
In 2011, the British Con-Dem coalition government imposed massive cuts to public spending, ostensibly to reduce the national deficit. The funding shortfalls produced by this austerity programme were to be met by opening up essential public services –schools, hospitals, universities, hospitals, libraries, and so on – to corporate investment and, where the profitability was likely too...
Double deed
A poem I found inexplicably frightening as a child.
Also I was bothered by the inconsistency in lines six to nine - following the logic of the rest of the poem the final noun in a couplet should be the first noun in the following couplet (so in these lines it should have been “when the belt…” and “when the tail…”).
What is “double deed”...
Customer Services Expectation
Am I being unreasonable here?
If you order something online and it never turns up, is there an expectation that the company from whom you ordered the items should refund or replace even if it wasn’t their fault and the item was just lost in the post?
Any problematic contract is between them and the Royal Mail. So it’s up to them to sort it out. That’s how I’ve always...
