I just saw the headline and I was a) HAI, paging Countess Elizabeth Bathory! (though I observe that the tales of her bathing in her virgin victims' blood to retain youth and beauty well post-date the actual case) and b) hasn't that already been some kind of near-future techno-thriller? surely it has? (It is so literalising the metaphor, no?)
Could ( Read more... )

Another large aquatic mammal disporting in the Thames: Humpback whale spotted in Thames east of London. Very unusual, and apparently not in any distress.
I suppose it is not very likely that it will swim all the way up to Westminster and then spectacularly beach itself in the vicinity of the Houses of Parliament in a symbolical fashion.
Whales ( Read more... )

That thing that happens, when at one point the thing I am writing is stuck and I am wondering why I ever committed to doing The Thing and I cannot make the leap to the next sentence or paragraph -
And then, not exactly suddenly, but within a short space of time, I am looking up and realising that the thing is pretty much finished, and there maybe ( Read more... )

What I read
Well, Sarah Dessen's The Rest of the Story was indeed a very good choice for inflight reading. I thought the ending was a bit heavy-handed on the symbolism though - hurricanes and houses built on sand (or false values) etc.
There was a new Slightly Foxed, and while this was the usual mix, this issue did have a piece on O Douglas, and ( Read more... )

I was rather perturbed by reading this account of the production of Julius Caesar at The Bridge Theatre at which 'The production is staged in promenade, with some of the audience invited, in the words of the production webpage, to ‘become part of the action'. Count me an old fuddy-duddy that would rather watch than participate - it was quite bad ( Read more... )

The central heating went off again yesterday, and of course being a weekend there was no prospect of getting an engineer out to look at it unless we were a priority category -
So today I was waiting in from 8 am until 5.30 pm. by which time - since the time frame we had been given was 8-6 - I was just about to ring up British Gas HomeCare and say ( Read more... )

There's an article in today's Guardian G2 on algorithms, which seem to me to have pretty much the same utility as any formulas - in some spheres they work very well, in others they appear to be fairly effective, in some instances one wonders if the correlations they get are not what they think they are, and in other cases (e.g. examples given from ( Read more... )

Will cop to possibly being deeply influenced at an early age by that episode in Kipling's Jungle Book in which Mowgli brings down the tiger Shere Khan with ingenuity and a herd of buffalo (and some help from his wolf brothers to get the buffalo running in the right direction).

I was massively niggled some while ago at being linked to some post by ( Read more... )

Caught my eye in passing, some assertion that the song long associated with Vera Lynn about Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover must have been by an American, because UK does not have bluebirds.

Some people just do not get symbolism and metaphor, do they?

I don't suppose they have them in Belgium either, but that did not hold back yer Belgian ( Read more... )

Contra that notion that the advent of energy-efficient lightbulbs that do not come on just like that, bing!, but light up gradually will completely eliminate the whole lightbulb metaphor and visual convention, I have just had a moment to which gradual enlightenment totally applies.

I have been asked to do a keynote at a conference next spring, and ( Read more... )