'Daily Mail' In Making Stuff Up Shocker

Here

And

More

Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. Wankers.

106 Books - Another Meme

Found via Slothblog; 106 Pretentious Books that I may or may not have read. So ones I've read are in italics, ones I started but didn't finsh are in bold:

* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
* Anna Karenina
* Crime and Punishment
* Catch-22
* One Hundred Years of Solitude
* Wuthering Heights
* The Silmarillion
* Life of Pi : a novel
* The Name of the Rose
* Don Quixote
* Moby Dick
* Ulysses
* Madame Bovary
* The Odyssey
* Pride and Prejudice
* Jane Eyre
* The Tale of Two Cities
* The Brothers Karamazov
* Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
* War and Peace
* Vanity Fair
* The Time Traveler’s Wife
* The Iliad
* Emma
* The Blind Assassin
* The Kite Runner
* Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations
* American Gods
* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
* Atlas Shrugged
* Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
* Memoirs of a Geisha
* Middlesex
* Quicksilver
* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
* The Canterbury tales
* The Historian : a novel
* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* Love in the Time of Cholera
* Brave New world - This was a set book at school.
* The Fountainhead
* Foucault’s Pendulum
* Middlemarch
* Frankenstein
* The Count of Monte Cristo
* Dracula
* A Clockwork Orange
* Anansi Boys
* The Once and Future King
* The Grapes of Wrath
* The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
* 1984
* Angels & Demons
* The Inferno
* The Satanic Verses
* Sense and Sensibility
* The Picture of Dorian Gray
* Mansfield Park
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
* To the Lighthouse
* Tess of the D’Urbervilles
* Oliver Twist
* Gulliver’s Travels
* Les Misérables
* The Corrections
* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
* Dune
* The Prince
* The Sound and the Fury
* Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
* The God of Small Things
* A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
* Cryptonomicon
* Neverwhere
* A Confederacy of Dunces
* A Short History of Nearly Everything
* Dubliners
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being
* Beloved
* Slaughterhouse-five
* The Scarlet Letter
* Eats, Shoots & Leaves
* The Mists of Avalon
* Oryx and Crake : a novel
* Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
* Cloud Atlas
* The Confusion
* Lolita
* Persuasion
* Northanger Abbey
* The Catcher in the Rye
* On the Road
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame
* Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down
* Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit
* In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
* White Teeth
* Treasure Island
* David Copperfield
* The Three Musketeers

How about you?

The Solution Is Closer Than You Think

As long-term readers of this blog will know, a few years ago we made the big mistake of buying the children a karaoke machine. Actually, let's be honest - Catherine made the big mistake. I just put my head in my hands and groaned.

I've not mentioned it much since because, quite frankly, after a few weeks they lost interest in it. No surprise there. Since then it's been cluttering up one or other of their bedrooms.

Several months ago we decided to get rid of it. It's in good nick, so we thought we'd sell it and recoup some of the cost of buying it in the first place. But, frankly, we were happy enough to pretty much give it away if that's what it took. Off we went to eBay. Now whilst it's not enormous it's not really the sort of item you want to post, so we made it 'buyer collect'. But at a starting bid of 50p it was a bargain even if you had to drive to Staines to collect it.

No-one wanted it.

We tried the local paper. Free to anyone who wanted to collect it.

No-one wanted it.

We tried eBay again.

No-one wanted it.

Now the problem with an item like this is that it's electrical. So it's actually quite hard to even give away - no charity shop would touch it.

As a last resort we decided to donate it to the local Guides jumble sale this weekend. Along with a huge pile of other stuff we were getting rid off I put it into the car and drove round to the church hall where the sale was to be held.

No, they said, they couldn't take that. It's electirical.

Well, I replied, perhaps the Guides would like it to use themselves? Free. Gratis.

No, they said, they hadn't got room to store it.

So into the back of my car it went, for the journey home.

On to the next morning. I had got home late, so the machine was still in the boot of my car, parked on the drive. We were off out for a drive so we needed to clear the car of junk. As a last resort we were considering leaving the machine outside the house and just waiting for someone to nick it. As I was lifting it out of the boot our neighbour came out of the house.

We exchanged a friendly greeting.

"Ha, ha", I joked, "Do you fancy a karaoke machine?"

"OK", he said.

Pause.

"No, really", I said, "Do you really want one? Free? Gratis?"

"Yes"

Result. Him and his other half took it, and our problem was solved. The only person unhappy about it was their teenage daughter, who begged us not to give it to them. Parents, eh?

So the moral of this tale appears to be: Dump your junk on your neighbour.

Nerdy Thought For The Day

If someone who kills a number of people one after the other is a Serial Killer, is someone who kills several people at the same time a Parallel Killer?

Snakes On A Bike

My children have been busy with the Lego again. Please stop by and cringe at their efforts:

Female Impersonation

Last night I successfully passed myself off as my wife.

Really.

But only on the phone. To Barclaycard. They did sound a bit suspicious, but when I had all the relevant security information to hand, they seemed to accept that the blokey woman on the other end of the phone was, apparently who she claimed to be. Identity theft - it's so easy.

It was all fairly legitimate. We've been having problems with Barclaycard for a few months now, owing to a combination of their on;line payment system being shite and their call-centre staff being incompetent. Since the card is in my wife's name I can't deal with any of it - if I phone up and try they refuse to talk to me. But she's got fed up withtrying to sort out this issue - there's only so many times you can shriek at staff in a Mumbai call-centre before it drives you crazy. So I said I'd give it a go. And got away with it.

And I think I got the issue sorted as well. Maybe. We'll see when we get our next bill whether their word is good, or whether Barclaycard continue to be a bunch of incompetent liars.

The Songs Of Distant Earth

When I first took this job one of the coolest things about it was that I got to work in the Arthur C. Clarke Building; apparently he opened it himself via satellite link. Today that takes on a rather sad significance.

My iPod will mostly be streaming Mike Oldfield's 'The Songs Of Distant Earth' today.

I'm Easily Amused

The volume control in BBC iPlayer goes up to 11 ...

Gary Gygax Fails Saving Roll

The co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, Gary Gygax, died yesterday.

It's been many years (over 25 at a rough estimate) since I last played 'Dungeons and Dragons', but it's impossible to overstate the effect that it had on my gaming interests. I'd been playing around with miniature wargames since (or even slightly before) I started secondary school, but it was the appearence of D&D that fired my enthusiasm and interest in games. For a number of years I pretty much abandoned miniature wargames in favour of role-playing games and when I subsequently rediscovered them in the mid-1980s role-playing games coloured my experience, and still do to some extent.

Through to Gary Gygax, D&D and role-playing games my imagination was fired and a whole range of experiences, interests and friendships were opened up to me. I owe him a debt of thanks.

BBC Link

Car Cocoon

So there I was, driving along the M25, music loud. I was singing, my head was bobbing and I was probably drumming my fingers on the steering-wheel. I was in car music heaven. As I reached a frenzy of enjoyment I glanced to my right and there, running parallel to me, was another car. With four women in it. All looking at me. And smiling. Laughing. Laughing with me. Not at me. Laughing with me. Really.

Earthquake!

Last night the UK was struck by its largest earthquake for 25 years. Wow! The epicentre was near Grimsby, whish might be a hint. Today the news and internet are full of people's stories and experiences - it was felt across England, from South of London to as far as Durham. Anyway, I thought I'd add my voice to the throng.

I slept through it. So did my wife. So did my kids. I'm not even sure that it woke the cat up either.

But it may have wobbled some shelves. I can't tell.

The Future's Grim. The Future's Pink.

Whilst casting about for something unrelated (Slaanesh colour schemes, if you must know), I came upon THIS.

And then THIS.

So wrong. And so begging to be copied and passed off as my own idea :-)

She's Going

End of an era today - Konnie Huq is leaving Blue Peter after ten years.

Not that I actually get much chance to watch it these days, but there you go.

Some Things Are More Extinct Than Others?

Flickr have recently added a facility which allows you to see various stats relating to your pictures and to your whole photostream. Part of this is that you can see referrals to your pictures, which, of course, allows you to see which search engine terms bring people to them. On my stream it would appear that most of my photostream hits each day relate to people searching for 'Godzilla', but my fvaourite was yesterday:

'five most extinct animals'

How does that work?

Sadly this facility also allows me to see that one of my pictures has been linked to from a white supremacist site in the US (and it's not even one of the Hitler ones). I have left the twats a little message in the description field ...

For the record, the top ten search terms in Yahoo photos which (at some point) directed users to one of my pictures yesterday were:

godzilla
wombat
kidneys
heptagon
succulent plant
ps2
torchwood
barnacles
lego droideka
austrian civil war

I'll leave you to work out which pictures they link to.