I’m mulling over writing another book - this one will be a proper grown-up book and one of the themes will be Good and Evil and whether they are two sides of the same coin. And then I just accidentally read this:
The Monologue of Evil by Augusto Monterroso
One day, Evil found himself face-to-face with Good and was on the point of eating him up to put an end to their ridiculous dispute once and for all. But when he saw him looking so tiny, Evil thought:
“This can only be a trap. If I now eat up Good when he looks so weak, people will think that I did evil, and the shame will make me cringe and shrink so much that Good will not waste the chance to eat me up, with the difference that then people will think that he did good. For it is difficult to free them from their preconception that what Evil does is evil, and what Good does is good.”
And so it was that Good got off scot-free yet again.
Two removal vans have carted our old neighbours’ possessions off in two separate directions to two different houses, and later today we’ll be getting new neighbours.
I just dropped a welcome card through their letterbox. I did consider writing another pseudonymous card to freak them out:
Hullo. We’re Nigel and Julie from across the street. Welcome to your new home! We’re sure you’re going to love it here, and we admire the fact that you’ve not been put off by the incidents in your house. Still, I’m sure the police did a good job of putting the garden back as it was.
We’ve put you down for car parking-watch duties on Mondays and Tuesdays. You can collect your tabard and clipboard from Number 17. Just like to point out that we don’t allow barbecues or bonfires and no loud music after 7pm.
Key party nights are every third Monday night. This month’s theme is leather.
All the best, Nige & Jools x x x
Today Steve Jobs shocked the world by making some unexpected apologies at a press conference in Cupertino, CA.
He announced to a stunned press pack, “I am sorry. We lost our way.”
As reporters dropped their iPhones in shock, he continued, “We made too much money and became too complacent and arrogant. Too many of our employees behaved like Comic Shop Guy out of The Simpsons. Too many of our products contained design flaws which we denied until the bitter end. This will change.”
“For too long I pursued a petty feud against Adobe, forgetting that without Adobe, the Macintosh would never have been a success even in its niche design markets. Today we are allowing Flash on iOS. We are launching low-spec, low-cost versions of the MacMini and MacBook, and we are cutting the cost of the iPad. We’d like to apologise to everyone whose iTunes accounts were compromised. And we promise to answer the phone when you ring us up.”
“One more thing,” he added after a pause.
“We will allow any track on an iPhone to be used as a ring tone or SMS message alert.”
Ok, ok, I made this all up. That last one is utterly ridiculous.
.
My kids want to use my Hackintosh netbook - a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 running Snow Leopard. One of the great things about OS X is its excellent built-in parental controls, but on a netbook with a small 600 pixel-high screen, the buttons for setting them up are off the screen.
I tried using an external monitor - with amusingly mad and useless results… then I found this trick. Open up a Terminal window and type
defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.8
This makes the next window you open small enough to see the required buttons. Set up the parental controls, type
defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1
in the Terminal command line.
Sweet!
I only ever meant my ‘Recently Read’ sidebar to have three books in it at any given time, but after a while I found myself reluctant to delete them as I liked having a record of my reading. I probably should have started a reading blog, but purely for my own benefit, here’s a dump of the books I’ve read over the last 18 months or so:
Caedmon’s Song by Peter Robinson. Picked up for a, ahem, song in Oxfam but oddly disappointing. Plus partly set in a village near where I grew up and the place descriptions don’t feel right to me.
The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton. Patrick Hamilton is the man.
Before the Frost by Henning Mankell.
Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights by Sophie Dahl. How could you not love a cookery book whose first proper section starts “We begin in the autumn because that’s when everything changed. Autumn is a season I love more than any other; for its smoky sense of purpose and half-lit mornings, its bonfires, baked potatoes, nostalgia, chesnuts and Catherine wheels.” On the other hand a (female) friend of mine points out that the only people who like Sophie are men. She also describes Sophie as a ’simpering blonde’. Like that’s a bad thing…
The Pyramid by Henning Mankell.
Before I Die by Jenny Downham. I wasn’t going to cry. Right up to the bottom of the last page. Then I read the last line and I cried and cried.
The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell. Much more complex than the TV adaptation.
Every Atom Belonging by Dan McKinnis - on Authonomy. Unfinished but I love it.
JPod by Douglas Coupland. Edgy. Or do I mean ASCII 101,100,103,121? Worthy sequel to Microserfs.
Sidetracked by Henning Mankell
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton. So wonderful. London between the wars through the eyes of three very different characters who meet in a pub called The Midnight Bell.
The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark. Diabolical. By which I mean: pertaining to the devil.
The Ill-Made Knight by T H White. Superb.
The Witch in the Wood by T H White. Just marking time - for me and the author I think - until we get to the real deal - the Ill-Made Knight.
Twilight in Eden by David Budd. A wonderful, surprising book. Just wish he’d change the title - but I’m working on that.
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. In boot fairs and school fairs I am rebuilding the Alan Garner boxed set lost from my childhood. Trouble was - I just didn’t like this. Not a patch on The Owl Service or Red Shift. Will try Elidor next.
Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton. So good. So, so good. Thums up. 10/10.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Warming to this very much as I go… dead sinister subtext but deceptively simply told.
Killing Me Softly by Nicci French. Good, but would she, would she have gone off with him like that?!
The Sword in the Stone by T H White - without this there would have been no Harry Potter. Taking me even longer to read… too heavy to read on the train as it’s part of the whole Once And Future King sequence in one volume.
The Ipcress File by Len Deighton - love the writing, the style, the tone. Took me ages to read, though. Very different to the film.
Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds. Just perfect, even if I’m not sure about the punchline. But then you need something to smile about at the end.
Bye Bye Birdie by Shirley Hughes - a graphic novel for grown ups by a great children’s illustrator
Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds - oh Tamara Drewe, how do I love thee, let me count the ways… always loved Posy Simmonds since The Silent Three strip back in The Guardian but this is on another level. A work of genius, a truly great graphic novel.
Les Belles Images by Simone de Beauvoir
The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
A Necessary End by Peter Robinson
A Dedicated Man by Peter Robinson
The Body on the Beach by Simon Brett
Bitter Medicine by Sarah Paretsky
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
Aftermath by Peter Robinson - one of the best of the half dozen or so Inspector Banks novels I’ve read
Raking the Ashes by Anne Fine
Gallows View by Peter Robinson
The Tulip Touch by Anne Fine
The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Complete Peanuts 1955-6 by Charles M Schultz
A Song of Stone by Iain Banks - oh soddit I’m giving up on this on page 77. Over-written. Annoying. I really only like 2 Iain Banks books: ‘The Crow Road’ and ‘Complicity’.
The Hanging Garden by Ian Rankin
Death is not the End by Ian Rankin
Craven House by Patrick Hamilton (wonderful, beautifully written and observed, much funnier than I was expecting but this is an early work before he got bitter)
Canal Dreams by Iain Banks (the trouble with this is that other people’s dreams are never that interesting… I ended up skipping the dreams just to get to the end. Just read that Banks thinks it’s his worst book and I can see why.)
Let it Bleed by Ian Rankin
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (some great ideas but not quite sufficiently well-executed - unlike the characters from Jane Eyre, Mr Fforde’s own characters fail to spring to life)
The coalition is such a success, I think this is not the New Politics - it’s the End of Politics.
The lion lies down with the lamb. There is peace, unity and all is good.
It’s such a triumph that I can’t believe no-one has thought of doing this before. Why stop at the 55% rule for dissolving Parliament? I don’t think we ever need another General Election ever again. Another election might risk political instability. It might risk us being thrown out of the political garden of Eden. All hail Presidents-for-life Nick and Dave!
</sarcasm>
Hey Alanis, now this really is Ironic: the party that said it wouldn’t do a deal with a party that came third in the popular vote, and which says the electoral system is unfair, came in third place in popular vote and third in the number of MPs. This party is now holding the balance of power.
Labour candidates crashing cars, getting arrested, slagging off pensioners and now seemingly breaking electoral law. On Twitter. What next ?!? I’m starting to think it’s all a cunning ruse by Labour after that alleged Mervyn King comment about the party who wins this election being so unpopular they’ll be out of power for a generation.
“Attention please, the sandwich man is in the main newsroom.”
“Sandwiches are now in the newsroom.”
“There are now two sandwich men in the newsroom.” (At which point I shout ‘FIGHT!’)
“There is now mayonnaise on the carpet of the main newsroom.”
“Will the Daily Politics runner please run past Radio Record, tossing her hair in a Harmony Hairspray commercial kind of way?”
“And again, please.”
“Could someone from This Week come to reception. I’m bored.”
Choice strips from numbers 301-601.
xkcd.com/308/ - interesting life
xkcd.com/314/ - dating pools
xkcd.com/323/ - ballmer peak
xkcd.com/327/ - exploits of a mom
xkcd.com/334/ - wasteland
xkcd.com/349/ - success
xkcd.com/363/ - reset
xkcd.com/374/ - journal
xkcd.com/377/ - journal 2
xkcd.com/378/ - real programmers
xkcd.com/400/ - important life lesson
xkcd.com/405/ - journal 3
xkcd.com/407/ - cheap gps
xkcd.com/420/ - jealousy
xkcd.com/424/ - security holes
xkcd.com/429/ - fantasy
xkcd.com/432/ - journal 4
xkcd.com/433/ - journal 5
xkcd.com/439/ - thinking ahead
xkcd.com/451/ - impostor
xkcd.com/456/ - cautionary
xkcd.com/458/ - regrets
xkcd.com/460/ - paleontology
xkcd.com/461/ - google maps
xkcd.com/463/ - voting machines
xkcd.com/469/ - improvised
xkcd.com/483/ - fiction rule of thumb
xkcd.com/489/ - going west
xkcd.com/513/ - friends
xkcd.com/518/ - flow charts
xkcd.com/528/ - windows 7
xkcd.com/558/ - 1000 times
xkcd.com/559/ - no pun intended
xkcd.com/568/ - well 2
xkcd.com/570/ - new car
xkcd.com/584/ - unsatisfied
xkcd.com/588/ - pep rally
xkcd.com/590/ - papyrus
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