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Birthday absence

Sorry I haven’t been posting for a few days: work and my birthday both got in the way. Enjoyed my day off, but now I’m straight back into the slog of things.

The good old Amazon wish list proved useful this year, yielding Teach Yourself Instant Italian and Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?: The Encyclopedia of Modern Life, both of which I’ll be writing about later. Sarah also decided that I needed support in my rash promise to make a new Gordon Ramsay recipe every week (I made “Sublime scrambled eggs” yesterday) by buying me a blow torch. Crèmes Brûlées all round then.

My lovely wife is also taking me to the theatre on Saturday to see Otherwise Engaged, which should be fun: I’ll be posting a review of that on my media blog once I’ve seen it.

But as a celebration party for the day, we did a tour of Greenwich, taking in The Mitre pub and Café Sol. The latter is a reasonable TexMex, although we encountered the strangest waitress there. She spoke fluent, accentless English, but couldn’t understand a word of it. Very strange. Wished she’d had a label on her saying “I’m from…” so that we could have used our combined French, German, Spanish, Russian, Welsh and Greek to have a stab at helping her out. She was probably from Poland though, so we’d almost certainly have been stuck on a certain river without either a paddle or one of our main courses all the same.

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Spiked!

If you haven’t heard that Living Marxism (I know, I know…) has transformed itself into Spiked, now’s a good time to have a gander. There’s very little hint of Marxism and there’s some good writing there. In common with New Statesman, there’s also some appalling writing there, but that can’t be helped. As an example, there’s a vaguely interesting but badly written article on mental illness in children there.

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Christopher Hitchens sites

If you happen to like Christopher Hitchens, here are some excellent sites:

They’re all worth having a read of and I urge you in their direction immediately.

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Does “Instant Spanish” actually work?

As regular readers may know, I’m working my way slowly through Teach Yourself Instant Spanish. I’m on week five now (flash cards will be going up on the site soon, once they’ve had a thorough testing) so that’s only a week to go and then some revision to consolidate.

The big question is: does it work? Is this all for nothing? Now, I had good results with Teach Yourself Instant Greek, so I was willing to assume the same of Instant Spanish. And I’ve been having relatively good results with the occasional bits of Spanish I’ve heard on the tele: I even managed to cope without the subtitles during Lost‘s Ana-Lucia flashback last week.

So I decided to do a written test today and I was pleasantly surprised.

Continue reading “Does “Instant Spanish” actually work?”

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Mr Yousaff: your time is nigh!

Remember Mr Yous(a|o)ff? Seems someone with similar thoughts to mine also lives in Lewisham and has referred him to the Advertising Standards Authority! Excellent organisation that they are, they do clamp down on offenders.
First off, my congratulations to Mr Richard Sanderson for having the foresight and the community spirit to do such a generous thing.
Secondly, I’m now feeling a bit rubbish for not having done the same. Do you think the fact that I recycle all the paper people leave by the mailbox, turn off the lights in the bin room when no one’s using them and generally channel my efforts into “green” things compensates? I hope so.
Still with Year of the Volunteer under way and the RSPCA in urgent needs of people to stroke cats and rabbits (according to Radio 1), maybe I should find other ways to boost my karma as well?

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Wow. The worst story ever written

Perk up journalists everywhere. No longer do you have to worry that your next article is going to suck: the bar has just been lowered.

The worst story ever written has seen the light of day.

It’s over here on the Christian Examiner. Bookmark it now. In the future, whenever you face self-doubt, just return to that story and feel all your worries fall away. Whatever you’re writing will never be as bad.

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Why has what doubled?

Just spotted this headline on the BBC:

A headline from the BBC news site: 'Men and prostitutes: Why has it doubled in 10 years?'

What exactly has doubled here? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

That’s right: I’m thinking they really do need some good subs at the Beeb.

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Ebola reservoir might be found

The BBC is reporting that fruit bats might finally have been confirmed as the reservoir for Ebola. It’s been a suspicion for a long time among many virologists that bats were carriers of Ebola (and potentially other filoviruses), so it’s good news all round if it’s true: we can now work on ways to contain the disease. If we don’t, there a good chance that most of the great apes of Africa are going to get wiped out very soon as Ebola makes its way westwards.