Today has been a Good Day.

• Cherry & Heather deli are now delivering to my office. So I had caramel shortbread for breakfast, and one of their lovely sandwiches for lunch.
  
  
• I was Appraised at work, and judged Awesome. Hurray. (Whether that will translate into Bonus is another matter entirely, of course.) I had a whole year without either sleeping in or turning up for the wrong shift. *is proud*
  
  
• I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to buy a new TV from Richer Sounds, and got an auto-follow from them. Corporate auto-follows are usually grrr-making, but I love Richer Sounds, and posted saying as much...and they DMed me to offer me a £10 voucher for saying so, which is now on its way. w00t! However...
  
  
• I went in after work and bought a new TV today anyway. I'll spend the voucher on something else - new headphones, probably. I've been talking about buying a new TV for ages and was starting to bore myself, so I decided to get it for Torchwood. Upgrading from a cheap five-year-old Asda 21" CRT to a Toshiba 32" LCD is shiny. (I didn't pay that much for it, Richer Sounds is cheeeeep.) Torchwood looks great on it, as do relatively old PS2 games.
  
  
• Torchwood! YAY! I really enjoyed it, except for one plot strand. Will leave it till after tomorrow's to do a reaction, I think, not sure I have much to say about it just now. Nothing intelligent, anyway.

I can hear the karaoke from two different pubs near me at the same time. Either of them on their own would be something I'd be trying to drown out, so both of them? Not good. Also the whole area is festooned with union jacks, which makes me mildly grumpy - glad I escaped the city for the weekend and missed all the Orange Walks.

The hundredpics community popped back up on my friendslist the other day, so I've decided to try that again - post a photo a day for 100 days. I'm going for a theme - I will take a picture a day of the clouds! (Stop laughing at the back.) My first three are here, and I also stuck up another photo I took yesterday that made me giggle in an adolescent way. Really, who designed this sundial?



The caption at the bottom? It says "morning glory". I know it's also a plant, but...

Of course, that interpretation probably, er, sprung out at me, because "morning glory" was mentioned in the book I've been reading - Slang: The People's Poetry. Which is very good, actually, at least if you find things like the following paragraph fascinating:

There is a difference between "nonexpletive" (a category that includes both Buffy-comicverse and oh as usual dear) and "anti-expletive" (a category that includes only oh as usual dear); and there is a difference between, on one hand, expletive inserts (such as Jesus H. tap-dancing Christ) and impletive inserts (such as oh as usual dear) and, on the other hand, "nonpletive" ones (such as Buffy-comicverse).

In what circumstances will the impletive supersede the expletive, avoiding a turn into the nonpletive?

(It's not all like that, but I did like that bit. Hee.)

Still hot. I don't deal well with weather, really. Overcast and about 15 degrees is the least objectionable type - barely noticeable enough to be called weather at all. The clouds were doing interesting things when I left work, though:



Altocumulus, I think.

I finally got round to getting a supporting membership for Worldcon and downloading the Hugo package on...Monday or Tuesday, and it's so worth the money. Many good (e)books and novellas and novellettes, and various other things, for £30. Will vote in the categories I've managed to read things in - at the moment the most difficult categories seem to be Best Related Book (because they're all great) and Best Short Story (because none of them grabbed me at all). Discovered via james_nicoll that at least I'm not the only one bemused by the existence of the Mike Resnick story on the shortlist.

Argh. Must get dinner before Big Brother. And then abandon Big Brother for Question Time, probably.

Long late shifts at work just now, dealing with Glastonbury, which is fun in a kind of flaily way. We know vaguely which artists are going to be on the BBC programmes, sometimes, and we try and prepare subtitles for their latest and/or biggest hits. And then we try to recognise them when they play them. Today I have been mostly using Twitter to find out what songs bands like Spinal Tap played, so that I could prep them - new media for the win! Fewer people were twittering about what Crosby, Stills & Nash played, sadly.

So, anyway, linkspam:

I didn't know who Ed McMahon was before he died. Farrah Fawcett reminds me more of a couple of lines of Buffy dialogue than anything else. I was never that into Michael Jackson. The only "celeb" death that's really affected me this week is that of Steven Wells, an ex-NME writer. He died of cancer: this was his last column, a couple of weeks ago, for the Philadelphia Weekly. ( Quote and more links under the cut )

(Vaguely related aside: watching Lauren Laverne presenting Glastonbury makes me want to look out my Kenickie CDs. She's one of my only girlcrushes.)

I've mentioned the Lord of the Rings re-read and discussion on Tor before, but I'll take the opportunity of them starting The Two Towers to plug it again - totally geeky, utterly fantastic conversation. Put aside a day or two and read the whole thing from the start.

If anyone hasn't read cereta's post On Rape And Men yet, please do, especially if you're a man. And read at least the first couple of pages of comments. I've been meaning to link to this and post about it for a while - I might still do a post. But I've been reading through all 17 pages or so of comments, too.

On a lighter note, blankets with sleeves! We saw these on the Big Bang Theory, and I looked them up because I Need One. Totally. Sometime before winter.

The Nieman Journalism Lab tells us that the New York Times has data on which words its readers look up in the dictionary. Interesting. And it also has an article about the Guardian's crowdsourcing experiment on the MPs' expenses claims.

An overview of the gay marriage debate, in chart form.

The best optical illusion I've seen in ages, and another illustration of why no, you shouldn't believe the evidence of your own eyes.

HTML Playground seems like a good way of relearning html and CSS by example, in a very web 2.0 stylee.

Jesus And Mo is always entertaining, but I particularly liked the latest one.

I thoroughly commend and recommend this How To Meet A Nerdy Girl post, if only because point #9 made me laugh out loud.

Tip #9: Embrace her collectibles.

That is not a euphemism for something pervy. It’s just a fact. When you walk into her apartment for the first time and notice a glass cabinet filled with a miniature TARDIS, a sombrero-wearing Giles, a 17-inch Han Solo and a two-foot long replica of the Enterprise NCC-1701-D, do not say, “What the hell is all this stuff?” Instead say, “What the hell? Why don’t you have MORE of this stuff? And may I mail order something for you?”

(Yes, I have a three miniature Tardii. And a sombrero-wearing Giles. No Han Solos, and no Enterprises, but I do have a Starbug.)

And finally, in case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Buffy meets Edward from Twilight. With inevitable consequences. One of the best mashup videos I've seen.

I have shortest night pics - or the night of the 22nd, anyway. ( This was midnight. )

( And this was about 3.45am. )

I've been playing Freelancer the last couple of nights. Haven't spent hours blowing up spaceships for far too long. Also reading Accelerando by Charles Stross, which is quite hard work, for some reason. Good, though. Need to finish it tonight because it's going back to the library tomorrow, and also because I have a bunch of new books from amazon that I want to read, including Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

And I'm reading a defence of fantasy in the Guardian - I expect the comments will be more interesting than the article, though.

Happy Solstice! And Happy Father's Day, too.

The longest day again. This is one of those short years. It's still been light-ish when I've finished work at 2245 the last couple of days; here's a photo I took yesterday:



While I'm in my flickr account, here's something I meant to ask you lot about. We saw this recruitment poster in Pizza Hut the other week:



"Pole Holder Required"? I mean, what? Is this pole dancing for very lazy people? A way to keep immigrant customers inside? What?

The Top Gear shenanigans tonight were highly amusing - I watched the whole thing unfold on Twitterfall and giggled a lot. Lots of people thinking they've RUINED the show, dammit, by revealing who The Stig is.

I think I need to watch all of Angel again. Someone asked me for my top five Angel eps today (well, he asked for my top Buffy and top Angel eps, but CLEARLY giving just one is impossible) and I couldn't really separate the episodes in my head, or remember what they were called. Apart from Smile Time. (Top four Buffy eps, in no particular order: Once More With Feeling, Passion, Hush, Band Candy. About half a dozen more vying for the fifth place.)

I finally managed to see Star Trek tonight, on the third attempt. Huzzah!

( I loved it, of course. )

Also watched the last four eps of The Big Bang Theory today (still best sitcom ever) and Fiddler on the Roof (uh, best Russian musical ever? I do like it!)

Whee! The Edinburgh Book Festival programme is out [pdf brochure]. Tickets don't go on sale till the 22nd, which gives me time to figure out who to go and see. Because MAN, the line-up is awesome. I just went through the brochure making a quick note of things I'm interested in:

Kate Atkinson
Carlos Luis Zafon
Simon King
David Crystal
AC Grayling
Iain Banks
Cornelia Funke
Jonathon Green
Neil Gaiman
Ian Rankin
Neil Gaiman & Ian Rankin (different event to above)
Susan Blackmore
Lewis Wolpert
David Sedaris
Jeremy Paxman
Vince Cable
John Sutherland
Christopher Brookmyre
Mark Millar
China Mieville
Alain de Botton
Douglas Coupland
Richard Dawkins
Richard Holloway

I don't think I can afford either the money or the time off work to go to all of them. Gaiman, Paxman, Cable and Brookmyre are must-sees, probably Coupland as well.

And Amanda Fucking Palmer is gigging in Edinburgh in August too, not coincidentally I expect, since she's dating Gaiman now. So right. So I want to go to that too; I've been loving the Who Killed Amanda Palmer album. (Spotify link, that one.)

Britain has a BNP MEP. This country is screwed...hope the protest voters are happy now. Sigh. From what I've heard, they increase vote rather than their total number of votes, which means that it was people not voting who let them in. No matter how much you're annoyed by the expenses row, the BNP really aren't a better option. Fiddling your expenses isn't quite on the same level as massive racism. (And apparently they can't even try to play the "We're not racist, honest" card - the elected member is a former member of the National Front.

Argh. How depressing.

I'm even more determined that a general election now would be a terrible idea - clearly the British public can't be trusted to have any sort of sense of proportion.

On the other hand, the Apprentice final was good, and it looks like Scotland has kept the same party mix of MEPs (2 Lab, 2 SNP, 1 Con, 1 Lib Dem) even though the vote shares have changed - there was a bit of a worry that UKIP could beat the Lib Dems to a seat. We won't get the final result till tomorrow night for Scotland, though - the Western Isles are refusing to count the votes on a Sunday.

Hmm, what news? I was at the zoo with my big camera and took loads of photos.

( Look! )

Today I have been reading the new Jim Butcher Furies of Calderon book (still not as good as the Dresden ones) and watching Big Brother. Tomorrow is the F1 and the Apprentice. And Big Brother. Oh, and the Euro election results. My life is so exciting.

Also, yay, we've got rid of Geoff Hoon too. Interesting times.

Elections tomorrow, of course - remember to vote, UK peeps! Even if it's the seemingly useless Euro elections and all politicians are assholes, it's worth voting 1) to keep the BNP and UKIP out, 2) because it's proportional representation, so your vote actually means something, and 3) I've completely forgotten 3 because the UKIP guy was so annoying on Newsnight. *stabbystabby* Um. Ah, yes, to stop people being able to say that voter apathy means they're satisfied with the government or hate Europe or think the EU is pointless. At least turn up and spoil your paper, if you can't bring yourself to vote for any of them.

Watching The Apprentice and then seeing clips from Prime Minister's Questions, you notice how alike they all are - mendacious, blame-shifting, ambitious, point-scoring, morally bankrupt gits, the lot of them. (Except James.) The fake chortling of the Labourites at Nick Clegg was kind of pathetic.

Good things: Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears both gone from the Cabinet! If only they'd quit completely, rather than just their Cabinet posts. Wonder if we can get rid of Geoff Hoon and Jim Murphy. For some reason, I still mostly feel mild pity for Gordon Brown - he's a bit tragic now.

Three (three!) great gay stories today - Obama announces July as LGBT Pride Month on the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, New Hampshire legalises gay marriage, and a gay penguin couple adopt a chick. Eee. Penguins! I'm going to Edinburgh Zoo tomorrow, penguin parade! Yay! But I've just realised that the schools will be off for the election, so the zoo will be full of children. Boo.

Ahhh, and an old HIGNFY on Dave with Diane Abbott is thankfully reminding me that some politicians are great. (Also that Michael Buerk saying "gimp mask" is funny.)

I have links:

• Tory Atlas of the World, from Spitting Image in the '80s, but still funny. Can't remember who I stole that from days ago, sorry! In an '80s politics vein, I'm reading the Yes Minister Diaries just now and they could have been written this year. In fact, they're a bit like The Day Today in that they don't really seem like satire any more.
  
  
• I was mildly shocked by this article by Charlotte Allen on CiF the other day - imagine the fuss if an atheist talked about Christians like that - but it's turns out she's just another nutter (or, if I'm feeling charitable, the print equivalent to a shock jock). This article she wrote for the Washington Post is frankly mind-boggling:
  
  

  So I don't understand why more women don't relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are...kind of dim.

  
  
• There's a great post by lone_lilly explaining privilege here (via miss_s_b)
  
  
• And a good article from CiF about the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, with loads of links, and a bunch of anti-choice crazies in the comments. (Calling them pro-lifers now would be PARTICULARLY ironic.)
  
  
• The BBC has pretty pictures of a new kind of cloud that Gavin Pretor-Pinney is trying to get classified
  
  
• And Richard Wiseman and the New Scientist are doing an experiment on remote psychic viewing via Twitter, starting tomorrow afternoon. Er, this afternoon. Tuesday. There was a test run on Monday that was pretty interesting and kind of fun, although I can't see how the thing can be seen as remotely* scientific.
  
  
• Also, thebookpeople have a clearance website, bananas.co.uk - it's EVEN CHEAPER. Thankfully there's not that much on it, or I would be killed by my book mountain sooner than expected.
  
  *No pun intended, but I must leave it now it's there.

I was about eight hours late hearing the news about the new Doctor Who companion, and I feel like I'm totally behind the times and out of the loop. That's the internet age for ya. I've been out in the sun reading a book about Philip Pullman/ Northern Lights.

( Apparently some people think they can avoid seeing/hearing about it for 9 months )

..I had more to say about that than I expected.

Question of the day, stolen from marrog and inspired by this tattoo:

If you were going to have a tattoo of five books (or their titles) somewhere on your body, let's say somewhere where it will be seen from time to time, what five books would you get?

It might be your favourite books, or ones that have changed your life, or that your favourite quotes come from, or that you think will impress people, or all of the above.

My five would be:

The Homeward Bounders - Diana Wynne Jones
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Babel Tower - AS Byatt
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Oxford English Dictionary

But it made me flail a bit to have to choose. I have another four or five bubbling under, and I'm particularly not sure about putting Gilgamesh in instead of Sayers' Gaudy Night.

..I kind of want a bookshelf tattooed across my shoulders now. With spaces so I can add things.

Ah, remember I said the Church had managed to do something right, and uphold the appointment of a gay minister? The world has gone back to normal - they've screwed it up again. In a debate on sexuality in the church today, they've decided to have a two-year ban on any more gay ministers being appointed, while they set up yet another commission on the matter. (The first commission was in 1994 - I think they keep coming back with the wrong answers.)

The Reverend Angus Morrison told elders and fellow ministers that the special commission would best serve the "peace and unity" of the church.

Well, in as much as it puts off the issue for another two years. Pity it doesn't serve, you know, justice or equality or anything like that.

In the meantime, they've told their members not to discuss the issue with the media, because as we all know, if you don't talk about it, it goes away.

The measure met with an angry reaction from the Reverend Alec Shuttleworth, who compared it to MPs who like to "blame the media" for the current expenses row.

Hurray for Alec! I was round at his house for pre-Christmas mince pies and snacks last year, somewhat randomly, so I'm glad I approve of his stance on the matter.

I'm not sure what'll happen now - whether the issue will actually go away again, or whether it'll rumble on in letters pages and presbytery meetings for two years. They're going to have to make a decision eventually. Maybe they're hoping some of the hard-liners will die off in the meantime.

In just in time to wish everyone a Happy Towel Day.

Which I seem to recall means there's something else important about today, but I can't think what.

Edit: Ah, it's the Glorious 25th. So a towel, a hard-boiled egg, and a sprig of lilac. How do they rise up?

Books I've read in the past couple of weeks (I've got a lot of time on my hands):

Turn Coat by Jim Butcher. Yay, a Dresden book! Borrowed, because I only buy the paperbacks. I didn't think this one was as good as the last couple, actually, but that's still way better than most other things.

The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien. Interesting to have read, and I think is going to make a real difference to my next re-read of LOTR, but kind of a slog to get through.

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. About how group formation and collaboration has never been easier, and the difference that might make to the world. Loved it.

Bad Things by Michael Marshall. Regular crime spook-fest from Marshall - decent, but I wish he'd go back to writing fantasy as Michael Marshall Smith, really.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert. Wolpert's theory on the evolutionary origins of belief, and how a concept of causation could have kick-started the evolution of homo sapiens. Not just about religious belief - everyday beliefs, "common sense", mental health issues, drug-induced beliefs and hallucinations, and the paranormal are all explored.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I thought this was "normal" literary fiction, and then the vampire turned up. Pretty readable, not as intellectual as it seems to think it is.

PopCo by Scarlett Thomas. Bit of a kitchen-sink novel, as in "everything but the". Anti-corporatist rant, mystery, Bridget Jones love story, code-breaking and ciphering textbook, espionage tale, workplace satire, homeopathy promotion. Mostly good, with interludes of WTF.

Careless In Red by Elizabeth George. Latest Inspector Lynley mystery. They're not astounding to begin with, and this one in particular is predictable, with too big a cast and too many unrelated stories, and a bad case of research showoffery that doesn't quite come off. (No, people in Cornwall are not all called things like Benesek and Selevan. Really.)

Currently reading: Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. It's obsessed with plants, and I can't take Mrs Danvers seriously thanks to Jasper Fforde. Next up will either be Great Expectations (I expect to have the same problem with Miss Havisham as I have with Mrs Danvers) or Matter by Iain M Banks.

The Church of Scotland has got it right, thankfully. They've voted to uphold the appointment of Scott Rennie, an actively gay minister to a church in Aberdeen (as opposed to all the closeted/ celibate ones they already have). Some people appealed against the appointment, and the argument's been bubbling under for a few weeks, and was voted on tonight at the General Assembly. It was closer than I'd have liked - 326 to 267 - but hurray anyway. There have been people talking about schisms and leaving the Church if it let the gays preach, so we'll see what happens. There were protesters at the General Assembly, but only a few of them:



Yeah. Westboro Baptist Church were apparently going to come and protest - they've got a press release that says "WBC TO PICKET SCOTLAND SODOMITE SCOTT RENNIE". God Hates Scotland – Land of the Sodomite Damned. Apparently. You know you've got problems when you've got Westboro on your side. They didn't come over in the end, though, we had our own home-grown homophobes from the Zion Baptist Church in Glasgow - its founder, Jack Glass, was once described by Ian Paisley as "a bit of an extremist". Heh.

Scott Rennie's got his own wikipedia page, I am amused to see, and it's been updated already to show the result of the vote. Apparently he's a Lib Dem and there were counter-protesters from the Lib Dems youth wing there today too (funnily enough, they didn't get on the telly), so yay for them. And yay for the Church of Scotland, which can keep its reputation as the least irritating, bigoted and authoritarian of the churches I know.

Coming out of Borders tonight after discovering that they've done something horrendous to the F&SF department - replaced half of it with "paranormal romance" and actual erotica, and the shelves are about half-full in the rest of it - I was cheered up by a lovely bit of graffiti on the Buchanan Street Tardis:



Aww. Not quite "Bad Wolf", but cheerier. (In another "There are 200 people in the world" moment, the page linked above, which is the first google result for "buchanan street tardis", is updated by one of my exes. Spooky.)

ObPolitics: Well, that was an anti-climactic resignation, Mr Speaker. We could have done with something more dramatic for the history books, since it's apparently such a big deal. I'm a bit torn on this whole expenses thing, because it's fun to watch the politicians flailing on the end of a line, and the scale of what some of them have been doing - and the number of them who seem to have been doing it - is appalling - but really. We knew they were largely untrustworthy, profiteering, mendacious, superior gits, didn't we? And is expenses fiddling, or even expenses fraud, the worst thing they've done in the past ten years, even? I suppose the problem is that we have to blame the whole House of Commons for this, rather than saying just the party in power is full of rotters. I'll be interested to see if the upcoming revelations about what other (probably highly paid) jobs the MPs have on the side provoke such public ire, because that annoys me much more.

I do admit to being chuffed that Martin's going, but mostly from a sense of lingering resentment - I used to live in his constituency, and none of the other main parties put candidates up against him, so your vote really is useless. And in the Scottish elections, his son Paul holds it for Labour, too. Though at least your vote's going to the PR list system, then.

I still have terrible trouble recognising Nick Clegg, every time, even when I just saw the same interview half an hour ago. He should wear a BBC News-style banner with his name on it around his waist - that might help. Possibly.

Brown's talking about a new independent regulator for the HoC - Gary Gibbon of C4 News was the first to dub it OfCommons, which I hope catches on. (For confused non-Brits, the independent broadcasting regulator is called Ofcom...)

Tomorrow I'm hopefully going to see Coraline - w00t and yay! Definitely going to see the doctor, and worrying about whether I should go back to work on Friday.