I was reading some background stuff about goings-on in contemporary Russia and how Putin organises things, and suddenly realised why it seemed so strongly redolent of goings-on 100 years ago: one of the main protagonists was called Volin.

Despite my excited fantasy, it turns out that this is not Volin, the anarchist revolutionary expelled by the ( Read more... )

Head full of cold, accidentally browse away from silliness on to some depressing heavyweight stuff (the Internet is terrible that way) about just how big a disaster the National Offender Management Service is. Notice that the page is full of 'NOMS', and suddenly I have the pleasingly less serious image of a giant blue monster munching up the ( Read more... )

Well that was a good weekend. We went up to Scotland - visiting friends near Glasgow on Friday, Edinburgh for a wedding on Saturday, back home on Sunday.
( Trains, meetups, zoo, dancing, and eclipse ... )