Did you know…?

I was in the post office at lunchtime today, and while I was waiting in the queue, I was watching this big TV screen in the middle of all the counters. Most of the time it was just going “Cashier number 4 please…”, but when it wasn’t doing that, it would show information about all the things you can get in the post office (don’t worry, I’m going somewhere with this…). The reason it caught…

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“If anybody just wants to talk, I’ll give them fifteen pounds, plus booking fee, to go home”

I almost considered taking Damien Rice up on the offer he made about a quarter of the way into his Brixton Academy gig on Saturday night. It had been a strangely dull gig up to that point, and this was the first thing he actually said to us, as yet another song ended in protracted feedback. At that point, I hadn’t noticed anyone talking–later on he said that there were probably a lot of “new”…

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See…

Earlier this week, I was mocked at home for reading a book about punctuation (Eats, Shoots & Leaves, natch, the Schott’s Miscellany for writers) instead of mindlessly watching Sex and the City and the Brit awards. Anyway, just to prove that it does matter, I feel it only appropriate to link to this article about how the judges ruling on whether San Francisco should continue to allow gay marriages have thrown out the conservative proposition…

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Trumpet blowing

I notice Yahoo! has just dumped Google’s search results… nice to see that in their new database Paste appears (for the moment at least) twice in the top ten results for creative writing magazine. But that’s nothing. We all know that the real search engine optimisation paydirt is with brain surgeon’s salary (first and second places! absolutely no useful information about how much brain surgeons get paid! result!)

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Busted? Really? This is a joke, surely

I think I might have blogged about The Brits last year. This year they’d certainly learnt one lesson from that exercise in paint drying observance, (no alcohol=dull ceremony), but other than that, it was more of the same old rubbish as every other year. I don’t know why I watch it. Like some kind of addict I just can’t help myself, but it always leaves me wondering why I don’t remember the last year of…

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Every time I start to think that I might have run out of things to blog about, I have a weekend like this one (when I was both sworn at in the street and asked to leave a pub for doing nothing more than trying to buy drinks). But first things first. On Friday night, we celebrated Sally’s quarter of a century by dragging a whole bunch of people out to the pub. It was…

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Much as I love my new shorter commute, it does create one small problem: I no longer have enough time to read the whole paper on the way into work. By this point in the week, and this one is no exception, I have usually acquired a large pile of unfinished Independents, and more often than not compound the problem by picking up Thursday’s Guardian, if only for Online, and Bad Science. This week, to…

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Dingo Stole My Baby (My Amazon thinks I’m emigrating) I love getting Amazon recommendations. I appreciate their attempts to do something clever with their user data, but in my case, preferring as I do to get most of my books from real shops, and my CDs and DVDs from cd-wow and play, I actually shop there so rarely–and when I do, it’s often to purchase presents for people–that their recommendations are always laughably skewed towards…

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Surrounded by fools… Sometimes I struggle to find the words to describe the incompetence that seems to permeate the customer service industry in this country. After last week’s unpaid rent debacle, when it turned out that our landlord didn’t really want any money off us after all, HSBC took it upon themselves to set up a second standing order to the landlord on a random date (today) and give them some extra money. 20 minutes…

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