IT'S HERE!!!

or it will be on 22nd october: donna tartt's new book, the little friend.
8/30/2002 05:27:05 PM #

 

questions which i have been asked this week

8/30/2002 05:09:22 PM #

 

uk registry grants privacy protection

nominet, the registry handling .uk domain names... will allow domain name holders the option of keeping their contact information hidden. just after i worry about saying i'm going on holiday. sadly, it only applies to the .uk suffix. if only we could trust the evil verisign.
8/29/2002 09:09:22 PM #

 

on all our houses

london - for the first time in decades - is once more at risk from plague.
8/29/2002 12:44:50 PM #

 

more books

thanks to charlie, bel mooney looks at "crossover" fiction and reminds us that young and old have always loved Very Big Adventures .
8/28/2002 09:13:13 PM #

 

stop

maxine carr is to give evidence via video link to avoid a repeat of last week's mob scenes outside the courtroom.

i haven't written about the tragic deaths of holly and jessica because, really, what do i have to say? two little girls have been murdered: of course it's a terrible thing. but now, with the media and the mob at fever pitch, with soham under seige from grief tourists, it seems to me that we are almost at the point where no one accused of these murders could be given a fair trial. ex-lovers of both of those accused of involvment in the girls' deaths have been wheeled out by the tabloids to say that they were always a bit odd, and the british public lap this up. it always used to be that cases like this were kept in camera, to ensure that press and television coverage did not prejudice the trial.

now it seems that the media are the trial. the coverage has been such that there seems no detail which has not been scrutinised and analysed over and over. this has got to stop. or we face the very real possibility that guilty people will have to be let off because that media trial has made any kind of legal process impossible.
8/28/2002 12:48:32 PM #

 

away

so, four days in dorset, unannounced here because it's just too damn easy for anyone to do a whois on my domain name and toddle round to steal the computer. usual amounts of beer and barbeques. heartily recommend sherbourne castle, once home to sir walter raleigh and the sort of smallish stately home i think i could quite cheerfully live in. with an excellent ruined castle-type folly in the grounds; i think when i'm done with cemeteries, i may well take up follies.

i think i've managed to stave off my being-thirty crisis. it doesn't matter if my job bores the pants off me because it pays me enough money to do the things i want to do. it's a fair exchange, some of my time for a fridge full of film and another box from amazon.

and now after five hours back at work, i'm ready for another holiday of course.
8/28/2002 12:30:17 PM #

 

deadvertising

graves could become advertising spaces in a sydney cemetery. firms would pay for the upkeep of the resting places of well-known australians. in return there would be a bronze plaque on the grave, acknowledging their contribution.
8/28/2002 12:18:43 PM #

 

i wanna live forever

man is made of carbon and diamonds are made of carbon so he just put the two ideas together.
8/23/2002 12:26:05 PM #

 

tourist information

you will notice that the bar counter of the pub is the only place in Britain in which anything is sold or served without the formation of a queue. link nicked from euan who got it from jason.

tourists in london may also find that the best way to buy a tube ticket is to stand in front of the large ticket machine, staring in disbelief at it, in the hope that the psychic facility of the machine is working. this will automatically read your desired journey from your brain and spew out a ticket, free of charge! if not, tentatively pressing a random button and then quickly hitting the big red 'cancel' button may cause your instant teleportation to your destination. on no account approach any of the uniformed officials hanging around the stations; "london transport: can i help you?" is the british secret service, and a nasty bunch they are too.
8/20/2002 09:45:27 PM #

 

in which i learn to read

in a pile by the door that leads to the room where the computers live, are the books which are waiting to be read. and top of the pile is ellis peter's the sanctuary sparrow. i know what the title of this book is. so why the elvis did i just read it as 'the satanic sparrow sanctuary'?

update: alan's reply to this post is much funnier than i deserve.
8/19/2002 09:55:08 PM #

 

help me obiwan!

tell me this isn't as addictive as i think it is.
8/19/2002 08:45:11 PM #

 

snakebite

bibi, 25, of west bengal, sank her teeth into the snake and killed it yesterday.
8/19/2002 08:22:34 PM #

 

powerless

i arrived back from saturday's cemetery trip (and the less i say about that, the better. i knew when i began the project that there would be large swathes of neatly marbled mundanity, but just quite how utterly boring chiswick old and new and gunnersbury were was quite a surprise. rather amused to find an obviously being used sleeping bag in one of them though.) to find that we had no electricity. the guy downstairs (the one who compulsively and violently throws up ever morning... have i mentioned that before?) told me it had been off for three hours. though he'd made no attempt to report or correct the problem, seeing more as an excuse to leave the house for a quiet smoke.

it's quite pointless for me to say "how much we rely on electricity", when i couldn't even phone up to report the fault because my mobile needed charging and the cordless landline won't work if the base unit isn't plugged in.
8/18/2002 04:34:49 PM #

 

wodehouse at war

just as i'm about to feel belligerent about some country, i meet a decent sort of chap. we go out together and lose any fighting thoughts. would we were all like this.
8/16/2002 12:20:31 PM #

 

spam we like

amazon reminders, of course. terry pratchett, robin hobb, robert rankin and a new edition of danny goodman on the same day.
8/15/2002 06:35:18 PM #

 

my real life

in my real life, i am very beautiful with long blonde hair and blue eyes. my funny and rich parents love me very much. i am clever (but not in the way that makes people tease me about it) and never do any of the things that seem right at the time but turn out afterwards to have been wrong all along. i live in a tower and own many books. sometimes princes and merchants come to ask for my fair hand, but i send them away and live happily in my tower with a tiger and two ravens.

but each night i dream that i am an ordinary girl with spectacles and braces, who is too clever for school and too stupid for the judges of good behaviour. this girl does not have many friends and often has nothing to say to the ones she does have. she lives with babies who take more attention, so there is little left for her except when she is bad. this girl is too tall and feels strange, out of place, all the time. as though she's been born into the wrong life. which of course, she has.

sometimes the nights seem very long.

i hope i wake up soon.
8/15/2002 12:40:34 PM #

 

censorship

support the banned books project

i am supporting the rights of adults and children to freedom of thought, speech and reading, the rights of writers to write and readers to read without fear and interference, the rights of everyone to their own opinion. you may believe that a book should not be read but that does not give you the right to ban it, to take away my freedom to read it. because if you take away my freedoms, how far around the corner is the regime that will take away your own?
8/14/2002 06:31:39 PM #

 

stupid stupid stupid

dave is having a few problems with people who want to copyright dinosaurs. so... i registered suezilla.com. should be live in 48 hours or so. what shall we do with it, my darlin's?!
8/13/2002 09:11:11 PM #

 

no caption necessary

just look at the picture. this post is dedicated to neil.
8/12/2002 11:09:42 PM #

 

sorry

you can find brompton cemetery here, and also some stuff about sex, but not both together.
8/12/2002 10:28:48 PM #

 

my god

philip pullman says that unless fiction starts to deal with metaphysics and morality, it will become worthless. mostly, i am happy about this; i am thoroughly bored with trivial and unthinking literature and could do with a good deal more like pullman. though it does leave me wondering what, if every writer were to take him up on this, i would read on the tube when i'm hungover.
8/12/2002 10:22:02 PM #

 

annoying

i finally installed xp at the weekend, and now every time i restart the computer, it loses my profile, and i have to start all over again, copying favourites files and putting in passwords and changing the sodding taskbar to the way i want it (and the clash singing 'lock the taskbar, lock the taskbar' in my head). why does it do this?! stupid fucking blue screen...
8/12/2002 09:43:44 PM #

 

yuck

why is my house so untidy? does anyone want a cleaning job in north london? ironing ability preferred.
8/12/2002 05:47:48 PM #

 

scribble

tablet pcs sound pretty much like pdas to me; palm had this technology two years ago. still, i'm amused to see the computer industry embracing handwriting as an input device; i know that my own has gone from occasionally beautiful and always legible to always scruffy and frequently illegible over the last couple of years. when do i ever write anything? occasional notes to myself, and that's about it. even 'gone out with the camera' notes to b. are (shame) usually sent from my computer over here to his computer over there.
8/11/2002 05:49:40 PM #

 

predictable

one camera returned from the shop, one camera newly delivered from ebay. what's a girl to do? six cemeteries in two days is what. mmm.

saturday was the last two of what meller calls the magnificent seven (the other five are abney park, highgate, tower hamlets, brompton and kensal green), west norwood and nunhead. the latter is rather sad and yet full of hope at the same time: twenty years ago it was hopelessly neglected and overgrown, and threatened with development of the whole site. around half of the original cemetery has been turned into a park, and that which is left is being cleared, restored and used again for burial. the chapel has been made safe thanks to a grant from the heritage lottery fund. thanks to its having featured in the evening standard's outdoors guide the day before, there were a couple of dozen other siteseers there; sadly i'm too damn selfish to feel happy to share my obsession.

west norwood is a different kettle of fish altogether. from the front, it looks like a tiny place with a few mausolea disguising what will probably turn out to be a few mean lawns. wrong. it goes on and on backwards from the road, and some beautiful trees disguise a series of quite incredible monuments, huge temples and statuary and a couple of stunning terracotta mausoleu for the tate and doulton families, clustering around possibly the ugliest crematorium i've ever seen. it began in bright sunshine and ended in torrential rain, so the photographs are going to seem quite strange i think.

today less exciting. after a fairly poor car boot sale at cuffley, to mill hill, which was, it must be said, boring modern lawn slabs in terms of monuments, but beautiful landscaping almost made up for that. then to willesden, for b's first experience of a jewish cemetery. he was struck as i was in plashet park at the similarity of the iconography on jewish and non-jewish graves; it seems we had both expected that a religion that insists on a seperate burial ground might also have a different symbolism. the municipal cemetery was barely worth visiting; i don't think i have seen a more boring example of row upon row of mean granite slabs anywhere. and then finally to st. john's gardens, an old burial ground now turned into a park by westminster city council; some of the old stones have been preserved, which means it gets included in the project; it wasn't terribly exciting either, but it was a whole bunch more attractive than willesden.
8/11/2002 02:08:53 PM #

 

nice haircut, shame about the personality cult

the president of turkmenistan wants to rename the months of his country's calendar after his heroes, apart from april, which is to be called 'mother'. (no way are you making my birthday the tenth of mother.) possibly this is indicative of how much absolute power corrupts, but it's hardly without precedent. at least he is (apparently) selecting people who have some meaning to turkmenistan. while we walk around measuring our lives by two dead roman emperors (plus some of their gods and a bunch of mis-counting). seems like a jolly sensible idea to me.
8/9/2002 12:20:46 PM #

 

cocky

thanks to charlie. i am happy to report that if i had a penis it would be six inches long. if you're going to try to estimate the length of someone's schlong, it would seem to me that "is the person male" might be a good question to start with...
8/8/2002 08:32:11 PM #

 

yes yes yes!!!

i am a geek. nonetheless, this is a very good idea.
8/8/2002 07:46:17 PM #

 

fan fare

you know where the books are. but occasionally something happens that doesn't quite fit there. this is one of those times, all kate's fault. i read draco malfoy the amazing bouncing ...rat? from start to finish. and goodness me, but it's good. and written, which is more than can be said for some people.
8/8/2002 07:34:41 PM #

 

dish delish

gods, how woman's weekly. i'm going to post a recipe.

crack-pot potatoes
  1. cook some small potatoes until they are just soft, but not fully cooked.
  2. using a masher, squash flat to approx. twice their original size.
  3. spray with olive oil spray (or brush with oil).
  4. sprinkle on herbs and spices of choice: minced garlic and crushed black pepper is a good combination.
  5. bake in a very hot oven for 10 mins or until browned and crispy on top.
  6. eat.

and very tasty it is too.
8/7/2002 09:31:17 PM #

 

more shopping

just because online shopping experiences that are 110% positive are so rare. on friday around 1pm i ordered a radial zoom filter from jessops. it was delivered today. yay jessops!
8/5/2002 08:42:30 PM #

 

you are perverted. in a way. not only do you celebrate excess but you find ways of making everything exquisite. you like pool parties, lots of skin and other gatherings that turn into bachanallian bliss. you're a humanist with near inhuman carnal desires. more often than not you're breed are predicted to rot in hell, so sayeth television evangelists. satan reserves a seat for you. you won't demure from an orgy if invited and you never cease the search for new contorted bodily pleasures. the party-animal in you could smell the scent of sex from a mile. you say yes to occasional bdsm and say no to bestiality. you are not that low. oral sex? you like it porn style. sexual positions? you can write kama sutra variations every year.

what sexual performer are you?
8/5/2002 08:27:25 PM #

 

jesus!

i had to leave the pub because dave was going to insist on telling me that the new church he's found is actually a good church. that despite my (and his) previous "difficulties" with religion, i should give this one a go. hmmm. which of us is about to hit a stupor about now, honey, and which of us has truly found jesus?
8/5/2002 08:18:17 PM #

 

memememememe

monday mission

  1. ever considered just deleting your blog and not doing it anymore? what prompted that and what stopped you? i did, once, delete it. because some guy mailed me and said, oh, a bunch of stuff relating to what i'd said in my 100 things that was calculated to hurt, and succeeded. i missed doing it. some nice people mailed me and said they missed me. so i put it back.
  2. how about a quick review of the last movie you saw? scooby doo, how funny are you?! [cinema] your entrails will become your extrails is the funniest line ever written, and tells you a lot about the intellectual level of this film [dvd]
  3. what's your favorite gadget? are you lusting for any new ones? will you ever be satisified??? i need a palm pilot. i'm fed up with getting off the tube with my pockets stuffed with lists and paragraphs on the back of old bits of paper from the bottom of my bag. i will be satisfied when i am dead, i expect.
  4. what "table game" do you enjoy playing most with other people? have you played it lately? i have two younger siblings. i don't play these games any more because they lead to war.
  5. have you ever been obsessed with something so much that it was close to causing you physical or mental harm? if not, have you known anyone else who has? i've done the food thing both ways, eating and not eating. i smoked far too much for ten years, and i still probably drink too much, though i think mild alcoholism is better than obsessive health-consciousness, which is the other path open to me.
  6. did you grow up in a family or community that displayed racist or prejudice attitudes? did it influence you in any way, either toward or away from those views? how did you manage to avoid it, or did you? i was brought up by people who loathed anyone outside their own narrowly-defined religion. race barely came into it because there were so many more specific things that they could find to hate. though i was told in all seriousness that aids was god's judgement on homosexuals. i asked why, then, lesbians didn't get it and heterosexual people did. lots of praying had to be done to get that demon of doubt out of me.
  7. good grief, i am starving! you got anything to eat around here? there's some bread, shall i make you toast? i think there's chilli in the freezer, how about a pile of chilli in a jacket potato with fresh parmesan on the top, and rocket and watercress and cherry tomatoes on the side? or we could call for pizza/chinese/indian/thai/lebanese/any other nationality that delivers here?

BONUS: what did you tell them? i didn't say anything, guv, not me.
8/5/2002 06:01:32 PM #

 

dr. suess warped me!

dr. suess warped me!

what dr. seuss book warped you?
8/5/2002 12:38:32 PM #

 

stupid

now all the people who don't understand that the web is all about linking can be found in one place. via tom.
8/4/2002 07:13:48 AM #

 

shopping

i need a plague of locusts snowdome, i do. as advertised on gothic.net. who, according to neil gaiman need more subscribers or they'll have to close. personally, i think that if i could get into any of their content to see if i like it, and if they had some other method of payment than the execrable paypal, i might go for that.
8/3/2002 11:21:57 AM #

 

waffle

please, america, do not buy this show. i am sad to say it because the cast are some of the funniest people on british tv, but the format totally sucks. this show, on the other hand, is the bollocks and should be compulsary for the world to see.

isn't it odd how "bollocks" means bad, but "the bollocks" means good.

despite its almost incomprehensible first paragraph (i know what he means, but it's not english that he's writing), brian sewell's piece on the diana memorial is the bollocks.

i can't find a picture of the actual memorial. it's a round ditch that varies in width so that the water flows faster in some parts than others. as a piece of landscaping, it looks like it will be reasonably pleasant to look at, if rather shallow. as a memorial, it will be oddly silly and easy to ignore. rather appropriate then.
8/2/2002 05:08:58 PM #

 

happy yorkshire day!

white rose
8/1/2002 08:03:57 AM #