-
The Rats In The Walls
My neighbourhood has developed a rat problem. The little old lady next door had a nest of them in one of the planters in her yard, and the nosy-but-nice retired couple on the other side of me saw a ginger cat kill one in the alley. So they called the council, and the rat man put down traps and poison in all of our yards ( Read more... ) -
Lime chicken
I thought up a very tasty and easy way to cook chicken thighs tonight ( Read more... ) -
In A Parallel Universe, Thorlabs and Newport Make Sex Toys
Maybe I've just been spending too much time searching websites for price comparisons on various optics, but this particular description (for Newport Optics Suprema series mounts) struck me as weirdly sexual ( Read more... ) -
Elm Tree
The quiz at Ye Olde Elm Tree (a pub which is considerably dingier and less pretentious than it sounds) is renowned for being among the hardest in Durham. Tonight, for example, they had one round that was all about prolific writers, and I hadn't heard of any of them. Which was pretty sad, considering one of them had managed to write 600 books... ( Read more... ) -
Moral dilemmas
This post was brought to you by spacefem who suggested that no posts in nearly two months was bad even by my standards ( Read more... ) -
it gave a lovely light
Today (well yesterday now) was the last full day of the international conference on atomic physics we've been hosting here in Durham - YAO 2007, the thirteenth annual Young Atom Opticians conference. YAO is a pretty unique thing, a conference organised by and for early-stage researchers in the field of atomic, molecular and optical physics. So ( Read more... ) -
Poetry
While reading the comments section from this article in Guardian Online about Jane Austen and wealth, I came across the following quote from a poem by (apparently) Keats ( Read more... ) -
The back pages of alumni magazines
I have a bad cold. This has led to me staying home and spending lots of time on the sofa. It also caused me to read my alumni magazine with much more than my usual thoroughness, which is how I discovered that someone I knew there got married recently. Hooray for Mattwood ( Read more... ) -
Far too funny not to share!
The department recently switched to an email alert system for parcels delivered to people at work. So for example, when my parents sent me chocolates for Valentine's Day (thanks parents!), I got a one-line email stating that my parcel was ready for collection in the finance office ( Read more... ) -
Song Meme
This is a variation on a meme by emeraldsword.
Take your computer's music player. Set it to random. From the first twenty songs, pick one line, and assemble the lines together into a poem.
( Here is mine: )