| Thanksgiving! |
[Nov. 26th, 2009|01:20 am] |
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Happy Thanksgiving, to all my American friends. I hope you all have a fantastic weekend; and I wish we had a similar happy weekend here in the Uk. We don't have enough celebrations over here. |
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| Muppet memes. |
[Nov. 25th, 2009|10:48 pm] |
Suddenly I understand what memes are. I think. The Muppets' 'Bohemian Rhapsody' appeared on LJ a couple of days ago via a number of people I read. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgbNymZ7vqY
Now it's been listed by someone completely different on Twitter!
I wonder where the link started from, and how many degrees of separation there are between an American writer of SFF and a British comedian? It's probably quantum. |
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| Science! (and Twitter) |
[Nov. 24th, 2009|11:35 am] |
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Is any one else following CERN on Twitter? http://twitter.com/CERN I don't understand very much of what's going on, but the sense of history and the excitement of the scientists come through so strongly, even in 140 letters. |
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| Sisters, sisters, there was never such a maddening sister. |
[Nov. 21st, 2009|10:07 pm] |
We've had the anti-Europe rant (evil EU bans curly cucumbers. No. Supermarkets demand straight cucumbers, EU just demands they should be fit to eat.)
Now we have Christians being persecuted in the UK because a registrar in a Council refused to marry a gay couple and was sacked, according to my sister. Disgraceful!!! I think the registrar should either do the job he/she is being paid for by the council tax payers, or find another job. But, no, it's persecution.
She wants to emigrate to NZ "now that Mum has died." (Our father is 90 and still going strong in Derby.) What a good idea! sez I. |
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| Nano update, and it amuses me already |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|01:45 am] |
There's something very entertaining about having my heroine discovering an unconscious man and thinking him alien because he has pale skin and wheat-coloured hair. Later we will discover that he has peculiar blue eyes, too! (Hello, my blond, blue-eyed relatives. *waves*)
Would it be cheating to call my spaceship's engine for ftl travel the MacGuffin drive? |
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| Plunk... Plunk... Plunk... |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|01:11 am] |
All day it has rained. Indeed, it has STAIRRODDED. (For the youngsters amongst you: stairrods used to be thin, straight tubes of brass that held the staircarpet down on each step, 'k? Thin + straight = a certain type of heavy rain.)
I can hear a DRIP and it's keeping me awake. (Plunk... Plunk... Plunk...) It's not in the kitchen (NB don't have a flat roofed extension for your new kitchen. Drips Happen.) It seems to be from the porch roof, directly outside the sitting room window. I'm sleeping in the sitting room because there is too much STUFF in what the estate agent laughingly called the Master Bedroom - so much STUFF, indeed, that I can't get at my side of the bed at all. Well, not without a serious and noisy accident. The downstairs futon is so much easier. Though considerably firmer.
Plunk... Plunk... Plunk... It's driving me nuts! |
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| Cabaret |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|01:35 am] |
I know, I know, it's late and I should be asleep. I've been watching a programme called 'The Real Cabaret' about Weimar Germany, Christopher Isherwood (my, what a good-looking man he was!) and Sally Bowles - both the real girl and the Liza Minnelli character - in the gay old days before Hitler came to power in Germany.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nf012/The_Real_Cabaret/ That's the link to the programme for UK viewers: do look out for it, my non-UK flist, if it's available chez vous. An excellent programme, and what I like best is that it treats homosexuality (eg of Isherwood) as just one of those things, and so what? |
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| NaNoWriMo |
[Oct. 24th, 2009|07:03 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | nano | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
I must be mad. I've signed up as Gauroth. Friend me if you're doing it, too! This year it'll be Space Opera - I do like Space Opera. Though modern ones have far too much graphic sex which is dull. So dull.
In Other News: Sacha is coming home from Portsmouth. She has a full-time job waiting for her at Waterstone's Bookshop in Enfield in North London.
Ian and John went down to Portsmouth yesterday to collect the first tranche of her possessions. Boxes of clothes, dvds, games, kitchen implements... We'll need at least one more convoy ("Convoooyyy!") to collect the books!
Ian and I are off to Kent on Monday, revisiting old haunts from when we first met 33 years ago. 33 years ago! Scary, eh? |
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| Formula 1 |
[Oct. 18th, 2009|09:51 pm] |
Congratulations to Jenson Button for winning the championship this year! |
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| Spaghetti House, London |
[Oct. 16th, 2009|12:23 am] |
Ye olde manne foregathered there this evening with old friends from the TUC, and reports that the food is still excellent.
I still recall the Lasagne I had there in the early 80s, a fortnight before it was bombed by the IRA. I'm glad they're still going strong.
ETA Wikipedia only has the Knightsbridge Spaghetti House Siege in 1975, when I was at university in Durham, 250 miles away. I am confused. I'm sure I remember a bombing of the restaurant just off Trafalgar Square, because I'd been there. Is my memory playing tricks? |
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| Archer and James Redux |
[Oct. 15th, 2009|07:38 pm] |
This morning's radio interview, in which it was suggested that with new tech a writer could continually revise a published novel, has been preying on my mind rather. I still think that just having one book from an author (the same book, again and again, forsooth!) would be - hm - frustrating; and ultimately boring.
I've been considering series. So often the books are the mixture as before, for instance Dick Francis, or Agatha Christie, or Georgette Heyer. I like those, partly because I know where I am with those writers, partly because I can enjoy the little variations to the pattern. What I don't want is the same book, expanded indefinitely: I love 'The Lord of the Rings' but the extras edited for lo these many years by Christopher Tolkien don't really appeal as stories. As archaeology and examples of The Master's development, yes; but not as stories per se, at least for me when I want a good read.
And Jeffrey Archer is no JRR Tolkien.
Thanks for your comments, flist. I was both dogmatic and unclear this am, I think. *wanders off, recollecting in tranquillity* |
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| Jeffrey Archer and Henry James. |
[Oct. 13th, 2009|08:56 am] |
Jeffrey Archer is rewriting 'Kane and Abel', his first blockbuster, 'for a new generation.' In a discussion on the radio just now, someone suggested that with books being available on new tech, an author could rewrite and update a published novel continuously. I think it was John Sutherland Professor of Modern English at University College, London.
I hope it was tongue-in-cheek! He did refer to Henry James, who was never satisfied with what he'd written (but, really, who is?) and I'd expect that any sentence including both Archer and James to be ironic.
How boring it would be, for author and reader, to have just one novel, continually improved, rather than a body of work where one can see how an author learns the craft of writing. Also, of course, how the author investigates different characters and situations. I'm thinking of Georgette Heyer's 'The Black Moth' and 'These Old Shades' which are basically the same plot written from different points of view and with different outcomes, different characters, different settings. Nothing wrong with that, because both are good fun.
The idea of having just one book, constantly tinkered-with, is horrible. What do you think? |
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| Old technology |
[Oct. 9th, 2009|02:19 am] |
Auntie Beeb is showing a wonderful series of how technology changed us. A family lives life as it was from the 1970s onwards. It's not just computers, it's twintubs and freezers and BMX bikes. Fascinating stuff.
The first programme is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00n1j8n/Electric_Dreams_1970s/
Thank you, those on my flist, who alerted me to this. For me it's a mix of nostalgia and horror (a twintub! And the mum puts far too much soap in the machine. Horrible machines; but my mother-in-law never upgraded to a washing machine. It took her all day to do the weekly wash. Thank goodness for washing machines) |
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| Cricket |
[Oct. 5th, 2009|09:29 pm] |
Congratulations, Australia, who have won the ICC tournament for the third time in a row. And well played Shane Watson, 100 not out. The only tension in the second half of the match was whether he'd reach a ton! |
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| Children grow up so fast |
[Oct. 4th, 2009|03:16 pm] |
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My baby boy is making his first long car-journey, all the way across the country from Hertfordshire to Shropshire. |
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| ye olde manne is not on LJ, thank goodness |
[Sep. 26th, 2009|01:20 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  amused | ] |
This morning at 8 am BBC Radio Wales phoned ye olde manne to discuss the economy, manufacturing, ect, ect. So I came downstairs to find him on the phone, COMPLETELY STARKERS, conversing about complicated economical stuff.
Thank goodness it was radio, not television. |
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| Cricket, of course |
[Sep. 17th, 2009|08:18 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  glum | ] |
Another day, another cricket match, another time for England to make an utter horlicks of the game. It's deja vu all over again. |
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