E pluribus avibus, unum.

This bird is Liverpudlian. I suppose - if it weren’t a seagull - I could call it the Scouse Grouse.

News and picture

News headline of the day: Peace ‘causes increased drinking’.

Also another picture. This time Ireland. Yes, all of it.

The future is here. Really. I mean it this time.

Today I checked in for my flight online while sitting on the bus on the way to the airport, further cementing my already inarguable status as the coolest and most technologically-advanced man in the world.

Except, of course, for the dude with a USB memory stick in his finger. Until some new technology with a sillier name makes his finger obsolete.

Dedicatory Lines from His First Book

It being custom, here I thank the one
Without whom none of this could be;
Who worked long hours, as I would compose,
To transcribe, type, and edit my design,
Who strove to cull the infelicitous line,
And whose gentle hand the best that’s herein shows.
That is, the maker of uncounted cups of tea,
The wellspring of the strength that got this damn thing done,
The one who now will turn it face-out on the shelf —
Of course I mean, Dear Reader, no one but myself.

Yet another example of me being terribly terribly late to absolutely everything

Hey, In the Aeroplane over the Sea is rather good, isn’t it?

Also, unrelatedly, have a photo (click for large version).

Cooking, sort of

After finishing a cake I realised I had a bit more extra buttercream than usual, so I thought I had better avoid my usual process of eating all the extra with a knife. My train of thought went roughly: “What would go well with buttercream? Not chicken…not grapes…not jaffa cakes…not caramel digestives…aha! Hobnobs!”

And so I made Hobnob sandwiches with buttercream inside. These were clearly a sign of the apocalypse, because I beheld, and lo, a Hobnob, and he that sat on him was Deliciousness.

In other words, how do you like your buttercreamhobnob
Mister Death?

Let me then to the marriage of Hobnobs admit more buttercream.

The cake came out all right, too.

Things

There are a few drafts hanging around that are now so massively out of date that I might as well delete them. One about all of the TV comedians coming out with DVDs within weeks of each other (most shot at the Hammersmith Apollo), another about library classification schemes that’s been waiting at least a year for me to think more about it, and a third about lots of things, including The Gone-Away World, which I posted about before reading, got linked to by the author, and then read and never followed up (short summary - it was enjoyable, though you did have to let yourself relax into the style).

Other things I apparently meant to write about: the variety and multiculturality of insulting gestures directed by pedestrians at a bus driver who stopped short in a London crosswalk; the way that Sour Skittles in the UK are sour without having to be covered in magical sour-sugar-powder (to which I could now add some thoughts about Skittles Crazy Cores, should I wish to); In Bruges, which I liked but now have no idea what I was going to say; an unspecified article about Shakespeare which predated the brouhaha now surrounding the portrait that is obviously and unimportantly not him; and lastly an even more unspecified article in American Scholar which I think was probably about the decline of the American university education.

Since then I’ve been thinking about mentioning books recently acquired or read, though the first group has grown to nearly 30 titles while I’ve only finished a collection of interviews with Borges which manage to be all about the same things, Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires, the latest in my trip through Gilbert Adair’s works, and am now onto the biography of Maurice Bowra.

I could also mention the number of crosswords I have completed since getting the Crosswords application for my phone (a lot), my frustration with being unable to finish any of them in less than 6 minutes (a limitation, I like to think, of the interface rather than of my ability), my trip to San Francisco, my first specialist catalogue, new shoes, a tasty lunch at Salt Yard, baking (and eating) a wide variety of cookies, very nice visits from various old friends (from A to Z, you could say), winning a Booksellers Pub Quiz, the new (and excellent) Decemberists album, or the difficult quest for a new pair of pajamas. But nothing much has been going on, really.

Thoughts from a bus

Sitting at the front of a bus, going from a major city to a college town, and watching patches of snow begin to appear on the ground as the road runs north…either everything is different but nothing ever changes or everything changes but nothing is ever different. Or both. Or neither, for completeness’ sake.

About ten minutes ago I saw a pub that I thought was called the Mullet Arms. It was the Myllet Arms, but it was enough to add to the trans-Atlantic confusion for a moment.

Earlier, watching the ice-sharteringly unoriginal music video for “White Tee” by Dem Franchize Boyz, I started wondering why a white tee - and of course a perfectly clean white t-shirt requires a leisure-ful lifestyle, avoiding labour, perspiration, and pasta in red sauce. They are not so different from Beau Brummel, these Southern gentlemen, in the end.

Also, this auto-correct system insists on capitalising the word ‘white’…did I get the Aryan phone model by mistake? It’s not even in a white case.

Thoughts occasioned by the LHC…

A little late, but hey.

Imagine that God is an infinite
Circle, a circle whose centre is nowhere,
Being without comprehensible limit.

Pascal did: and that is where we’ll begin. It’s
A shortcut around a thought too large to bear–
Imagining a God that is infinite.

Some things escape our sight yet are within it:
The closer we look, the smaller what’s there,
Seeming without comprehensible limit.

Niels Bohr was able to imagine it,
A circle, of course. Although to be fair,
Imagining God is an infinite

Distance from electrons, as a minute’s
Thought shows. But at least the thoughts are prepared.
These scenes without comprehensible limit:

Unbounded space, or where a boson’s been. It
can be, seeing those, an easy affair
To imagine that God is an infinite
Being without comprehensible limit.

And it was an absolute steal

Who has two thumbs and an awesome Victorian chaise longue picked up for a song at a provincial auction? That’s correct, it’s this guy.

And just one more week before I can type on a real keyboard using more than a single finger again. And stop uploading badly-exposed phone pictures while I’m at it.