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.

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.

Things I have now that I didn't have this morning:

• A bin bag full of clothes to take to the charity shop.


• A brand new shiny library card, thanks to a visit to the Mitchell. (Where I was "helped" by the slowest typist in the world, who also completely failed to check my requisite two forms of ID. I could be ANYONE running off with their books. ANYONE.)


• Only five books to read from the library, cos four of them are on two-week loans. Julian Baggini, Dan Dennett, David Crystal, JS Mill and, er, Tricia Sullivan. Good haul. Worried my friend by spotting the enormous Cambridge Grammar Of The English Language and going "Ooh! I read his blog!"


• Three pairs of socks with robots on them, a t-shirt, a hoodie, a bra and a wallet, but sadly not an outfit for the wedding I'm going to in ten days, which was the actual plan.


• A stomach full of lovely lovely fajitas from Buddha. (Er, that sounds odd. It's a pub, obviously.)


• The Dead Like Me film and the new Big Bang Theory episode to watch, and Red Riding taped, too.


• TICKETS FOR WATCHMEN TOMORROW NIGHT YAY!

BOO: My mediabox's DVD player seems not to be multi-region, even though all the websites that mention it say it should be. I'm sure there's a code somewhere. But it doesn't matter because...

YAY: I can copy .avi files straight on to the 1GB USB stick that came with the box, plug it in to the front and watch them*. Hurray! I'm starting Heroes from the beginning, to watch them all again before S3 starts a month from today, and my DVDs are region 1, but I have all the eps on the computer anyway. Ha.

Went to see Mark Thomas tonight; he wasn't nearly as good as last time. Bah. But I did see Danny Wallace sitting outside a pub smoking, so it was worth the trip. I played a very good game of Scrabble on the train, too. It's the small pleasures...

* I need a bigger stick for my box...so to speak.

I have new shinies! My DVD player/ VHS player/ DVD recorder/ Freeview box/ hard drive is awesome. One of these snazzy "plug it in and it'll go off and set itself up" things, which is nice. Thought I had audio problems, but it turned out that the SCART cable had come loose, doh.

I'm watching The Doctor Dances - it happened to be on, and what better show and episode to christen the new box? More or less every line is a classic. We're just getting to "Rose, I'm trying to resonate concrete." Also (to go randomly work-related) the subtitles are damn good for a digital box. They're more or less hitting shot changes and everything.

Got my Wii, too, but haven't set it up properly yet. I've spent most of the day (well, since I got up, which was stupid-late) tidying, and getting rid of the piles of crap that were growing around my TV. So, yeah, now I have far too many entertainment options. I've started watching Battlestar again, only got three more eps to go in the first series...

"That's what we do when we get out there? That's our mission? We seek new life and...?" "Dance."

It suddenly seems highly appropriate that the new box is a panaSONIC. Bwah.

I have the new Half Man Half Biscuit album, CSI: Ambleside. Hurray. Also, the shops hardly stock any CDs now, it's all DVDs and games.

Rangers seem to have lost the UEFA cup final, but people are letting off fireworks round here anyway, presumably on the grounds that well, they've bought them, and it's a long time till Bonfire Night.

(Ha, I forgot to turn off shuffle on WMP, and Half Man Half Biscuit suddenly changed into David Tennant chattering at me. I was very confused.)

I want this t-shirt:



(That's Zoe, folks, not Wash. And there are some other good SF/ political t-shirts there too.)

And I want this chest of drawers:



Fractals. WIN.

Also, best rap about tea, ever.

Edit: Many apologies, but I just had to have this icon.

miss_s_b has found, seriously, the best thing ever. I know I've said other things were the best thing ever, but I was wrong. This is. OK? And if I ever say anything in the future is the best thing ever, remind me of this and I will concede I am wrong.

It's a Stephen Fry/ Jeeves alarm clock. It wakes you up by saying (65 different) things like

"I’m so sorry to disturb you sir, but it appears to be morning. Very inconvenient, I agree. I believe it is the rotation of the earth that is to blame, Sir."

I've ordered one, obviously, and I will attempt to persuade my parents to give me the money for it, since they've been muttering about new flat presents. Apparently it's not great in the usability stakes - it doesn't have a snooze button, and it goes off every 12 hours, unhelpfully - but since I require two alarm clocks on a regular basis anyway, this can still be one of them. Hooray.

Let's see, what else is in the 14(!) windows I have open?

London Olympic logo. Well, everyone else has said most things about it, but I can't NOT see Lisa Simpson giving head in it now. Also, if you're familiar with goatse (Do not google at work), you might be amused at one of the logos sent in to the BBC's competition, which was on the BBC website for a while until someone noticed. It's been archived here. (Entirely worksafe.)

Several hours later, I come back to this entry...

From sdn, Abi Sutherland on Making Light wrote a sonnet in Lolcat on an open thread. Theresa Nielsen Hayden posted it on her blog, and now there's a very long thread of amazing literary pastiches in Lolcat, L33t and text adventure speak. Some brilliant stuff on there - I just spent far, far too long reading it. My favourite that's short enough to quote:

Im in ur Xanadu,
eatin ur laudanum.
Oh noes! Doorknock!

From matgb, Sorted Books - tell a story using the titles of books. Hee.

marrog has Lolrats. Hee again! I still think rat babies are cute, heh.