The Hums of Ceres Wunderkind

08:26 am - The (further) Decline of the West

Delighted to learn (from the pages of the Guardian) that the Motörhead group have a song called "Rock Out With Your Cock Out". I'm sure the world would be a much better place if more people rocked out with their cocks out.

Even more delighted to encounter the entries for this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards...

Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

10:04 am - Accident Prone

That's me. A week ago, more or less, I left a bag containing lots of valuable stuff in a motorway service station and was extremely fortunate to get it all back. A day or two after that, I broke my glasses - expensive! And last Sunday I found a broken tooth - no idea when it happened - which the dentist is looking at today.

They say these things go in threes. I jolly well hope so...

08:24 am - Across The Straits Of Mercy

Listen...

03:37 pm - Three Cheers!

For the people at the eastbound Leigh Delamere services on the M4 who looked after my lost bag after it was handed in by a good Samaritan. It's enough to restore your faith in humanity. The bag contained most of my life, apart from my phone and wallet.

Phew!

09:07 am - Music Meme

From dolorosa_12. Pick 20 songs you never get sick of. They don't have to be in any particular order. Pretty simple, huh?

1) The Beatles - Tomorrow Never Knows
2) Underworld - Thing In A Book
3) Steely Dan - Rikki Don't Lose That Number
4) The Beach Boys - God Only Knows
5) Radiohead - Kid A
6) The Prodigy - Funky Shit
7) Noel Coward - Sigh No More
8) The Beatles - And Your Bird Can Sing
9) REM - Sad Professor
10) Robert Wyatt - Sea Song
11) Cream - Born Under A Bad Sign
12) Underworld - Good Morning Cockerel / Best Mamgu Ever (Two songs, but I treat them as one)
13) Rolling Stones - 2000 Light Years From Home
14) The Beatles - Strawberry Fields Forever
15) Fairport Convention - A Sailor's Life
16) Nic Jones - Canadee-I-0
17) FW - She Moved Through The Fair
18) Japan - Nightporter
19) Underworld - Dark Train
20) The Beatles - Eight Days A Week

One of these has no singing, but hey...


Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

05:47 pm - Guardians of Glory, Part Fifteen

OK, it's been a while but I've been doing other stuff. Nevertheless, GoG remains an ongoing project and to prove it...

( Read more... )

05:34 pm - How Very Sad

CBeebies Waybuloo Christian Response

I mean to say! Christians objecting to "religious indoctrination". Whatever next?

10:21 pm - Who cries so loud?

Today the doctor gave me tears.

Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

01:49 pm - It's going to be hell when I get home

One very upset panda

12:14 pm - Peril on the roads!

I've warned my friend Stephen, who drives a Renault Laguna, to keep the radio turned off while he's on the move.

The last thing he needs is for someone to come on the air and tell him to crash it!

09:21 am - Tesco Customer Service (Good News)

Last week we made a home delivery order from Tesco. We do this sometimes - it cost £3.50 delivery charge and you've got to spend time on their slightly awkward site and, of course, you can't actually look at the fresh produce before you buy it. But it's handy if I'm busy.

Well, around a couple of hours before expected delivery time, they contact FW to tell her the van's broken down and could someone go into the shop and pick the order up? As it's on the way home from IDUS I say yes, and I pop into Customer Services and a chap loads the order onto a trolley, tells me before I can ask that they'll be waiving the delivery charge, I take it home in the car and that's that.

Only it isn't. This morning FW gets an email, telling her they're refunding the entire order.... Forty pounds' worth. I'm not sure whether this is customer service beyond the call of duty or just that their system, having been told that the order hasn't been delivered (as opposed to collected), has cancelled the whole transaction.

Is this an ethical dilemma? Should I call Tesco and offer to pay? I can't return the goods, naturally. We've eaten half of them...

No. It'd cause chaos. Instead, here's some free good publicity for Tesco. Their delivery system works well, and if it doesn't (in my case at least) they do a good job of compensating you.

There. Deal?

08:47 am - Today, I...

...cackled with glee to discover that Chanel sell a scent by the name of Beige. I'm greatly looking forward to smelling it, along with Sensible Navy Blue Skirt by Givenchy and American Tan Support Tights by Guerlain.

Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

10:29 am - Last week it was Bash The NHS, this week the BBC's in the frame

James Murdoch, son of the more famous Robert, has been whingeing about the BBC again: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article6814318.ece.

When are these guys going to realise how transparent their ambitions are? Murdoch hates the BBC because it isn't a commercial organisation. Or else, he hates it when it is a commercial organisation. He hates it for being "dominant", but only because that's what he thinks News Corporation should be. (as if it isn't already....)

Get this, Bobby. We like ad-free television. We like paying only £10 or so a month for all the BBC's channels. We like not having to watch Fox News.

Oh, and by the way; we like ad-free television. Got it, yet? Trotting out the same dreary old life-expired evil-gummit, markety-choicey bollocks won't change that.

Now run along back to Daddy.

11:19 pm - Teh 125-Meme

De teh Dolorosa...

( Read more... )

12:25 pm - Never A War, Part Four

05:58 pm - Rewrite / Remodel

I've decided to redo Never A War in the present tense. Here's the whole thing so far...

( Read more... )

08:48 am - 'Evil and Orwellian' – America's right turns its fire on NHS

In a way it hardly matters. Not to me, anyway. I've got a free at point of delivery health service and if America wants to condemn its people to a system where you're either insured or you're not that's America's business, not mine, although I'd prefer it if the business-funded US press refrained from lying about us.

But only up to a point. There are going to be some serious funding problems for the NHS over the next few years, largely as a result of the (American originated) credit crunch. It'll only take the combination of a budget shortfall, a Tory government and a timely report from, say, the Adam Smith Institute, and we'll be going, step by step, down the same path. Insurance companies and private hospitals will cream off the young, wealthy and short-term ill, leaving the poor, elderly and chronically ill to an increasingly underfunded NHS.

02:07 pm - Never A War, Part Three

The View From Tanly

( Read more... )

03:09 pm - The Joy of Creation

I'm sitting here writing when I should be working. Bad old me. But a feeling of unalloyed pleasure just swept over me and I thought I'd share it.

I was simply writing an ordinary sentence, something about Johanna Chen talking to her friend Bella-Louise Morgan in her manor house outside the town of Tanly on the land of Edge on the world of Glory and it suddenly struck me - I know these people and these places. They're completely real to me. And I've made them all by myself (whatever that means). Ronni dolorosa12  said something a while ago about my affection for Glory - well she's absolutely right. It's a joy to visit these places and talk to these people.

I'm sure that all writers must get this feeling from time to time. It's good, because it's independent of one's readership. It keeps you going. It must be similar to the feeling you get when you sit and look around a garden you've made (this is pure supposition - I'm a crap gardener).

Do fic writers get it? I don't know. Back when I was writing HDM fic I mostly wrote about my own original characters in my own version of Philip Pullman's worlds, so perhaps I wasn't writing fic in the true sense. Perhaps that's why I dropped it (after giving it a jolly good kicking first).

OK, self-indulgent musings over. Back to work (or not).

09:52 pm - Mixed Feelings

I'd have loved it if Charles Stross' Saturn's Children had won the Best Novel Hugo, but I'm hardly disappointed that Neil Gaiman's got it instead with The Graveyard Book. I'll guess I'll have to read it now :)