Hit and miscellanea

A collection of short ramblings today.

1. A review I gave on a website of one of Thomas Hardy’s most famous novels:

Jude the Obscure is also one of the most unpleasant to my mind. If I remember this right, the plot goes: “Boy meets girl, everything goes wrong, she throws an animal’s penis at him, they try to better themselves but fail, they get married, then separate, then she emigrates, but comes back, they have kids and then she kills herself and the kids and Jude is alone and unhappy.” Phew. Oh, and just in case no one’s heard yet… ‘Buy my books (top right.)’

2. The BBC. They annoyed me last night. The standard of speech and grammar at this once great institution is now appalling. It was bad enough when they stopped using English. Apologies here in case I offend Americans, but American is NOT English. They are different. Americans tend to miss out vowels. Color instead of colour; armor instead of armour; aluminum instead of aluminium. Also, pronunciation. Route is pronounced rowt instead of root. We say advertISSment while they say advertIZEment. I’ve no problem with this, but that’s the American language, not the English. Since the BBC are the long-standing national and international bastion of Britishness, I would no more expect them to use an Americanism than I would expect them to slip into a comedy French accent. “Allo, and ‘ere iz zee news”. But this is far from the worst aspect of the Decline and Fall of the BBC Empire. This set my teeth on edge:

In a piece on Michael Jackson, the reported reffered to “a number of the officials on site, including Jackson’s father.” Official what? Fathers? He then went on to use the phrase “questions surrounding the state of Jackson’s health at the time of his death.” Now that’s just beyond belief.

3. The perfect woman. Wifey and I discussed last night how she is the perfect woman, but what situation would be the most perfect. I believe I evetually settled on: Wifey wearing Roman armour, with a whisky in one hand and a pie in the other while watching Star Wars. Pretty much all my hobbies rolled into one. And there’s no point in trying to get me sectioned. I already have a rubber room. I just also have a rubber keyboard with rubber keys. The rubber toothbrush is an art, though.

4. Pet hate #1. People putting used things back in a packet. Eating peas from the pod and then putting the empty pod back. Eating sweets and putting the used wrappers back. And so on. Oh, and #2 leaving one sheet on a toilet roll so that you have to change it. Actually I’ve talked about my pet hates before. I’m creating a new page to display thyem specifically. Watch out for it… top right.

5. Being asked to fix computers. Because I work with computers, everyone, down to a friend of a friend of a friend thinks that you’ve got nothing better to do with your time than fix their problems. I’m not talking about you here, Uncle Fester, so don’t panic. I have, maybe four people, including family that I help, will always help, and am happy to help. But it just goes way beyond that. I’m currently trying to retrieve all the data from a laptop hard disk for (at best) a casual acquaintance that bores me stupid. And I bought an external hard drive caddy that could fit a laptop disk and plug into my PC, only to find his HDD uses far too modern technology for that. And when, after days, I finally got the contents of his disk onto my PC it turns out that it worked on vista, while I’m on XP. Basically, I’m nearly there, but it’s turning into a marathon. Now that I’m close to finishing it, yesterday I got a text message from a friend I see infrequently, asking me to help him with his PC. I’m close to screaming.

6. Allotment. My God everything is growing like Jack’s beanstalk (phnar phnar) at the moment. All the flowers are coming out and the lawn is a lush green. The odd half day of rain followed by four days of blazing sun is creating plant paradise. Unfortunately the same is happening for weeds as for flowers and veg. I removed probably over a hundred thistles from our allotment patch last night. The unused plot next to us is breeding them and sending them out under cover of night on a mission of conquest. But our veg are doing magnificently. Due to wifey’s disbelief that any of it would really grow at all, she threw masses of lettuce and radish seeds in the row in the hope that the odd one would grow. They all did. It looked like a verdant hedge, and she’s had to thin them both down by 2/3 so that they have room to grow. And I went a bit nuts planting onions. When they’re ready, we’ll have enough red onions, white onions and shallotts (which I previously thought were some kind of French shorts) to keep a family of 30 for a year. We may have to set up a market stall at this rate!

7. Finally, and it’s been mostly a ranting day, rather than a funny one (for which I apologise): but it’s a sad moment.

One of Diaryland’s great bloggers, Cosmic, has passed away. While I never knew her personally, I read her blog and was touched and amused by it. And some of the other bloggers (both on Diaryland and on WordPress) that I most admire and respect were among her friends. Sympathy to the family and to all friends.

Requiescat in pace, Karen.

Simon.