Random burblings since 1999
Developing news: The well established and highly regarded BBC News website has turned to parody and satire. Experts* presume that falling ‘hits’ have prompted this move, but are baffled as to why it has happened so suddenly.
This kind of story is direct evidence of this new direction. It is worrying that such a reliable source of information is featuring such ‘news’.
* Ahem… that’ll be me then.
George Bernard Shaw
Born on this day in 1856: A brief biography.
(Homer Simpson quote, hence the lazy American spelling…)
I work for a wonderful company.
They buy us cakes and doughnuts every Friday.
Cream filled, chocolate covered doughnuts.
Damn, should’ve washed my hands before typing, keyboard all sticky..
As predicted I’ve finished my ‘work’ already, so I can push on to other things, which is good as they are usually the things that get dropped first.
However I’ve decided on an early lunch and a quick surf first, and I thought I would share the fruits of my labour with you:
The art of creating a legend – spotted this one Sunday then got distracted. Very interesting piece: “Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes?” As a recent starter of The Count of Monte Cristo (cast aside for a couple of much easier, beach style, novels) I will certainly be picking it up again. It also made me think of a book I read about 5 years ago: Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. Full of wonderful prose, and phrases, it was a sumptious book to read. A harrowing, yet simple story told with loving use of language.
Karl Osama Bin Marx?. Interesting article drawing parallels between the Marxist movement and the ‘Islamist’ movements prevalent today. It offers suggestions on the future direction of the ‘war on terror’, and the only weak part was this sentence thrown in towards the end of the article: “Capitalism, too, is stronger and more humane than in the days of the robber barons and the Great Depression.” I realise he is not saying that Capitalism is humane (no journalist in their right mind would try that one), but I think it could have done with a little more justification to balance the piece. Interesting stuff though.
On a related note I also found this excellent, although long, article written by Giles Kepel: “The Trail of Political Islam“. For those of us, myself firmly included, who are not quite up-to-speed on the whole ‘Middle East thing’ I strongly suggest you take the time to read it. Interesting predictions towards the end.
Loch Lomond National Park, and the Lomond Shores centre was opened yesterday by HRH Princess Anne. Having spent a lot of my youth in the area, living only a few miles away, I guess I took a lot of it for granted. As HRH said “Those visitors who come to Scotland very soon realise that it’s pretty well as near perfect as you can get, until of course they come across the ‘x factor’, which is the midge.”.
And continuing the theme, we are headed to Skye for a long weekend soon, and I am so pleased that “Of Scotland’s thirty-four species of midges, only four or five enjoy humans and the most indulgent by far is C.impunctatus, the Highland midge”. Guess we’ll have to get the extra large can of insect repellant. Although a good substitute is to take my Mum. Anything that flies and bites seems to home in on her, leaving everyone else completely fly free.
Working at home today. Which is good. However as usual I fell into my trap of deciding to do some work last night, so I could get a bit of a lie-in. Of course it doesn’t work that way, never has, I just keep forgetting.
So, turned off the laptop at 00:34 last night, and yes my alarm clock went off at the usual time of 06:45. This was after Louise ‘checked’ that I was in bed last night by slapping me on the arm at 4 a.m., an activity she has done before and which takes me 30 mins to get back to sleep afterwards, once my pulse has come down from the stratosphere. She insists that she sleeps through this. I have my doubts.
One bonus is that I’ll have finished my planned work for today (paperwork mainly) by about midday. The downside is that I know I’ll keep working until about 6ish when Louise gets in. Should make for a nice relaxed Friday though.. well excluding the other 40 or so items on my ‘to do’ list.
Speaking of which, didn’t I read somewhere that an ‘expert’ reckoned that maintaining a ‘to do’ list was counter productive, that in the current high paced world we live in, it was better to classify incoming tasks as, Urgent (do now), Required (do if there is nothing urgent needing done), and Task (ignore until someone requests it enough to be Urgent).
Anyhoo, this was supposed to be a quick post about not getting enough sleep… brain too addled obviously… nothing new there then!
If I told you that Light Emitting Polymer will be the next ‘cool’ gadget to have (quotes around cool in case you don’t think gadgets are, by definition, cool. Of course no-one like that actually exists so I guess it’s a bit defunct, anyway I digress…) you’d probably tell me I was mad..
I say, Ohhh reeeallly…..