What I read
Finished A Banquet of Consequences, and, okay, family that makes the Starkadders look like the Waltons at the centre of the plot. But at least Havers is somewhat on the way to rehabilitation and not being transferred, and while I am not convinced by Lynley's new affair (I consider his new squeeze is entirely prudent to maintain high ( Read more... )

This morning's weird spam: Your Invitation To Network Over Breakfast
If a group of 25 people, living and working all over [areas of London where yr hedjog does not live or work], each spent 15 minutes a month discussing the good reputation of your business with people that they know, that would be 6.25 hours a month of your business being talked.

( Read more... )

No, really, huh??? WHUT???
The once popular novelist Eleanor H. Porter wrote the original children’s book Pollyanna in war-ravaged 1913.
I don't even.
Furthermore:
a) the USA did not even enter the war for several years after that.
b) Not to mention, not exactly ravaged by the war in ways that would seem at all credible to members of the European ( Read more... )

Dept of, yet another call-out to Joanna Russ and How to Suppress Women's Writing: it suited everyone to think of Thompson not as a journeyman writer but rather as a hedge-scribe, an empty vessel through which the rural England of the 1880s had channelled its dying song.

***

Dept of, getting it Rong Way Round: This was a Rosetta Stone before the key ( Read more... )

Reading Lucy Mangan on the latest spa treatment where other treatments do not go, I R Hysterian of Medzin, and on reading that 'pampering your pudenda is basically a matter of squatting over a mugful of herbal infusion', I am all, 'No! No! that is what you do to get that pesky wandering womb back where it should be!' Don't these people no enything ( Read more... )

In the ads down the FB sidebar, one that touts losing 27 kg per month*.

When you click through, it actually gives a slightly more plausible 1-2 stone**.

But I think there is some significant error there in their lbs/kg conversion!

(And on that alleged panoptic FB tracking of interests, why on earth do they think I care? or does everyone who ( Read more... )

For some reason I get regular spam from Lonely Planet, which I occasionally look at in case there is anything moderately amusing in them.

Today they are trying to convince me of the virtues of 'slow travel', including:
[C]ycling the canals of Amsterdam.

Glug...glug...glug...

Nor have I noticed the pace of cyclists on dry land in Amsterdam to be ( Read more... )

A number of things spotted recently made me think, wow, these people have never read any classic Golden Age SF, have they:

Seen somewhere, claim that children no longer need to learn arithmetic, they can just ask their smartphones. Story by ?Asimov set in distant future where machines do all the calculating. An ordinary joe-type guy is discovered ( Read more... )

Given to think, by an exchange yesterday, of how far it's reasonable to go in combatting some prevalent error in understanding, in my particular instance, of certain facets of Victorian medical practice.

I can see writing an article or book which is on some topic one already perceives as worth writing about in which one engages with some other ( Read more... )

This article was amended on 26 February 2012. The original referred to Christopher Marlowe as the writer of The Duchess of Malfi. This has been corrected.

After reading the print version, which has 'Marlowe' in the headline and several times in the text, I was going 'I know there's a lot of revisionism going on around the authorship of Jacobean ( Read more... )