I am trying (trying *trying* TRYING) to get more writing done - writing I'm not paid for I mean. It's hard. This kind of thing helps. A bit. Btw, found it a bit creepy how the Guardian site was plastered with BMO ads for me - what ads were you given?

Richard Stanley Francis (31 October 1920 – 14 February 2010)

Dick Francis has died, aged 89. Although no one of his books ever stood out as an example of 'great literature', they were all works that gave you an 'oh, that's all right then,' feeling when they were done. The writer of the obituary linked above encapsulates Francis' genius perfectly:

I once wrote a review of a Dick Francis thriller without reading it. I wasn’t going to waste a new Dick Francis on a bloody review when I had a transatlantic flight coming up, was I? So I wrote a piece saying that I knew the book was going to be good. I trusted it, and that’s why I was saving it for later. Three bloody Marys and a new Dick Francis and you’re in New York before you know you’ve taken off.

Dick Francis' last book, Cross Fire, co-written with his son, Felix, will be published this Autumn.

happy 4707!

...now where's my ang pao?

ah, vanity

I was trying to figure out if I was having so much trouble uploading this because of the file or because Facebook is a whiny bitch. I guess FB is to blame - they just 'simplified' the site yet again so of course half of the stuff I actually use is broken. I realised that I haven't many pictures of myself from the past year or so, largely because I became enormously fat, but I got into my skinny jeans today (got into, did not zip, that's for another time) so was feeling moderately presentable. I struggled with Photoshop for a while to get it to do that 3 photo strip photobooth thing - I don't actually have the faintest idea how to use PS, but occasionally like to pretend. And then get horribly frustrated and nearly throw my 'puter across the room. This time I actually managed to subdue it in the end, although I did have to make it black and white in iPhoto as I couldn't figure out how to do that in PS, embarrassingly enough.

The brain, as explained by two of the greatest minds of the past 50 years

Farewell to the language of Bo

The BBC reports that the last speaker of Bo has died, taking her language to the grave with her. We can be thankful that Boa Sr was working with linguists in the last years of her life, so corpora of data on this Andaman tongue exist. In memoriam:

On the Coast of Coromandel
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
Two old chairs, and half a candle,--
One old jug without a handle,--
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,
These were all the worldly goods,
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.