Still Blowing Strong: 134 Years of Whistle Making

Innocent enquiry: what are doing tomorrow?

Strange and bizarre answer: Going here.

I saw Nigel Dempster this morning. He was wearing an anorak. I found that to be disappointintly unrakish.

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Broadcast | Nancy Banks-Smith: TV review

If I could write like Nancy Banks-Smith for one day, I would be a happy woman.

small ones really are more juicy

just so say, with relation to oranges, this is definitely true.

also, something i'm always fascinated by is that some people call all different orange variants by their correct names... "some people" is actually a lie, "one person i know" would be nearer the truth ... and when i used to live with that person our journeys round the supermarket were often accompanied by him mirthfully smirking at me while i indiscriminately called satsumas, mandarins, and, er, "oranges" (can't think of any further variants) oranges (sample sentence, "shall i get some oranges?" meaning "shall i get which ever of the above happen to look nicer). apparently my blanket orange-naming was one of those odd relationship things that is both endearing and annoying (i.e., it can't be allowed to occur without some subtle and patronising attention being brought to it, but it's not actually bad enough to be a Deal Breaker), when i can't help thinking that surely the pedantic chuckling is just plain annoying and so, because it is a competition, i win.

now obviously i wouldn't say that if he was an information architect doing some work for me; then i'd be really pleased that he was keen for orange differentiation, but I suppose i'd only be really pleased if he also remembered that all those different types of oranges are variants of the same thing, and so at some level need to be described collectively.

Well I'm glad I got that off my chest.

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Press&publishing | Titmuss transformation earns her a million

Oh. Is it me or is it not just really depressing? Hmmm

adumbrate

for some reason, i've become obsessed with this word. but more than that, i keep trying to use it to mean the exact opposite of what it means ... erm, so i guess i keep trying to use it as an antonym of itself. i keep trying to use it to mean "list out" (sorry, awful grammar, i know, but i have absolutely no idea of how to convey that general idea correctly ... um *thinks* bah) when it means "to allude vaguely". i probably look it up twice a week, always knowing that it means not-what-i-think-it-means but never able to remember what it does mean. which is why i'm writing about it here, to help me remember.

oh funny stary-eye feeling from being starey-eyed at a computer for too long ... not even that long, really, but somehow too long for a sunday. have these awful doomladen feelings that am never going to get everything/anything finished ever or at all ... oh, moan, sigh, misery ... am also terribly hungry but can't seem to bear the thought of extending time spent here by going to get food so am, er, wasting time by writing in my blog. about nothing.

hmmm. *thinks for a moment* i should probably go and do something else (less boring ... erm, no, more boring) instead.

sigh

We Are What We Do - Change the world - Quality life

just about the best thing ever

joyce being like metro

Who'd have thought that two such different things could share the same Way of Reading: "it is Joyce's outstanding mastery of that form and his amazing powers of transcription that show this to be an unrepeatable, solo performance that need, in a sense, only be looked at rather than 'read' to provide a sufficient impression of its radical, unique status." (from Seamus Dean's introduction to Finnegan's Wake)

more about reading the paper

unfortunately the sun online hasn't updated it's letters page yet today. this is mostly a shame becaue there was the strangest ever letter in there today, written by a woman, about abi titmus being ace for getting out there and selling her sleazy calendar. apparently, sleaze has done great things for abi and jodi marsh and jordan and everyone should stop being so down on it. personally i find abi titmus to be a bit depressing and tawdry, but i don't suppose it's any of my business. what i find strange about the letter, i suppose, is it's odd ultra-liberal right-wingery -- you know, let us be free to get rich from "peddling this filth" sort of thing. anyway, two more gems from what I suppose must be yesterday's "Dear Sun". Certainly worth the effort of writing a letter and posting it in; I'm glad that Roland and Gwen are so moved by the plights of Peter and Charlotte -- it's certainly better than worrying about global warming or the human rights abuses happening in Iraq:

FULL marks to Peter Andre, who continued singing while being pelted with bottles. For once the yobs didn’t have their own way.
GWEN BARNES
Charfield, Gloucs

AT 18 Charlotte Church is too young to put herself under pressure to have a successful album. She will make herself ill.
ROLAND SMITH
Newcastle upon Tyne

i must get a camera phone!

on my way to work this morning i saw two of the most brilliant things ever... the first was an evening standard hoarding (which i now see must be about two days old, have no idea why i didn't see it before) that said "Ronnie Barker's Son on the Run", and the other was a very sweet little Japanese girl with a Snoopy bag that actually, wierdly, said "Spoony" rather than "Snoopy".

i obviously now feel mildly chastened that the Ronnie Barker's Son story is about child pornography, but it is still completely hilarious. among which constituency of people is a story about Ronnie Barker's son going to sell more papers? **who** exactly is going to break their journey and part with their hard-won 35p because their curiosity is so piqued by this remarkably non-oblique Standard headline? (i say remarkably non-oblique because they're normally things like "H'wood Star's Divorce Woe", in the interest of cynically selling as many papers as possible). In a (adopts best Michael Howard voice) Celebrity World Gone Mad, it's very refreshing to see someone totally get it wrong like that. Ho ho ho

oh my god

Start your own bliss blog powered by thezpace

this will be neither interesting or shocking to anyone else, but it's quite frankly amazing to me. because (a) it seems to be a pay service -- how can that be so when so many blog services are free and, duh, teenagers don't have credit cards and (b) well, liability, liability, liability. Jesus. I can see the headlines now. I spent about three years in my old job trying to work out the feasibility of doing something like this, before finally realising that i couldn't be bothered. i wonder what emap's digital strategy is now, then? and how on earth do you effectively monetise teenagers online, while balancing the liability issue? because if they're paying you, you better be looking after them properly.

*wow*

too many years sorting out public-service moderating really spoils your idea of fun.

sending myself to sleep

so, work is quite funny, isn't it? i mean, some of the things you do For Work are not really related to work at all -- as in, what you're actually paid for -- but are more related to the, uh, politics of the thing. um, yes, not making much sense. i'm very tired. but for instance, i did something today that was supposedly Social, but it was much more hardwork than most things i ever have to actually do in my job. sigh. and so now i'm having a little inbetween-meeting-lull and i feel like i deserve a break but i've supposedly had one because I had my Social Lunch That Was Really Work.

anyway, i had a nice sleep in the cinema last night, while watching Hero. It was quite disappointing and boring, despite the dream tony leung-maggie-cheung-chris doyle combination. i mean, it looked lovely but you know, I must have slept all through the "green" bit, because I only seem to remember the red and white and blue bits. i wonder what made them chose those colours? wish i knew anything about chinese narrative conventions (not generally, but just for the next ten minutes) because there would then probably be all sorts of clever nuances etc. that i'd be stroking my chin and appreciating ... which i suppose is just another way of saying that it wasn't very good. but there's nothing like the huge pleasure i get from sitting in the cinema and deciding that i'm not that bothered about the film but would actually just like to have a sleep now. hmmm. in fact, thinking about it now is making me want to curl up and zzz

on metro being a bit evil

today is one of my most boring kind of work days, so i'm allowing myself the luxury of a little 5 minute indulgence on here. anyway, there are two things on my mind and i may as well vent at least one of them now ...

last night i seemed to maybe leave work a bit earlier than usual, and so there were lots of other people travelling at the same time as me (for some reason i tend to always leave work just as it's tailing off a bit, which is quite a good thing; another hour in the office being somehow preferable to the torture of sitting next to fat german tourists eating marks and spencer pasta salad, which was what i had to deal with last night. i don't know, i kind of feel that people should shy away from eating food that needs a fork on public transport. don't ask me why, but it just seems wrong.) anyway, creatures of habit that commuters are, there was all sorts of excitement generated by the fact that there was a special Nike-sponsored evening edition of the Metro. Now Metro is a total anomaly to me; I can't even really read it because, well, because you don't even **have** to read it. all you need to do is glance across the page fleetingly and I sometimes get really seduced into picking it up, because I see other people looking so intently at the pages (and i'm sure that's all they can be doing -- looking, rather than reading) that it seems like there must be something so fantastically fascinating in there that I sometimes pick it up ... but it never is interesting, it's always just, well, the same as every other day. but ANYWAY, on the other side of me (i.e., not the pasta-salad eating germans) there were some people talking about how, now they've moved out of London, what they really miss is reading the Metro on the train in the morning. And one of them, as they were gettting off, said "Oh, can I have my Metro back, I've not read it yet, and I was saving it to read on the way home."

So I guess the thing with Metro is that it's just like mental wallpaper, providing an extremely passive distraction so that people on the tube don't have to look at or listen to other people on the tube. If it were any more challenging than that then I guess no one would really want to bother with it first thing in the morning, but still, the patronising public-service part of me feels that it's somehow ruining something about society ... everyone reading exactly the same poorly written "news" stories every day, most of which aren't even really news but press releases, so that whoever writes the copy for the front page of the Metro is surely the most important opinion-former in the capital ... and there being nothing in there that's really very new or different or challenging ... i mean, every day it's the same ... some kind of scandal about hospitals or public health, some celebrity gossip, something about how to be more attractive, something about someone from a developing country who's done something novel or gross ... I dunno ... and then is that what everyone thinks about all day and talks about at work? obviously I don't know, because i just sit here on my own being a bit mental, but it's a great shame if it is.