en – Page 69 – Denseman on the Rattis

EN · MEDIA

Nude survey

2007/05/24 21:16

Press Shot of the Event: Spencer Tunick and 2000 Nudes
Originally uploaded by amitylane.

The Scotsman on Sunday has an interesting survey about being nude that they’re looking for participants for.

I think their list of female celebrities is somewhat uninspiring, though. 🙁

BTW, are there really people out there who’ve never walked around their house naked?!?

EN · NEIGHBOURHD · OBITUARY

John from the cornershop just told me that Mrs. Hughes, our neighbour in 0/2, passed away a week ago in the hospital where she was being treated for a chest infection. Because she had had her throat removed, I never managed to have a meaningful conversation with her, but I often saw her in the close.

EN · HUMOUR · SIGN

Feed your kids to the puma

2007/05/20 00:09

Mountain Lion Safety Originally uploaded by ekai. I think the people who designed this puma encounter guide failed to realise two important facts: (1) People tend to read pictures as a temporal sequence. (2) Not everybody can read English. If I ignore the text, my interpretation of this sign would be as follows: Move backwards, holding out your hand to the puma (to make it follow you?). Then hold up your hands and scream in terror. Now get your kids and feed them to the puma.

EN · POLITICS

A paranoid bully

2007/05/17 22:56

Mr. Brown, in the library, with the knife Originally uploaded by minifig. And thus it’s been decided: Gordon Brown will be the next leader of the Labour party, and as a consequence prime minister of the UK. Unopposed – no challengers. He received no less than 313 nominations from the 356 members of Parliament for Labour. To me, that proves two things: He is a bully. There’s no way anybody can get so many nominations without bullying people a lot, and indeed I read today in The […]

EN · TRAVEL

Absurd prices

2007/05/11 23:30

Night flight! Originally uploaded by roomman. I just booked tickets for going to my sister’s wedding in less than two months’ time. I chose Ryanair for lack of a better alternative, only this time flying via Dublin instead of London Stansted. The total price for two adults, two kids and an infant came to almost exactly £400, which I guess is not too bad, but what is starting to annoy me seriously is how much higher this is than the ticket prices the show you early on […]

EN · HUMOUR

Bizarre quiz

2007/05/09 22:22

I found a truly bizarre quiz through a link on Sebastian’s blog. My result was this: Which Nigerian spammer are You?

BLOGGING · EN

When I die…

2007/05/03 21:45

I found this brilliant cartoon on Stephen Pollard’s blog on the website of The Spectator. It’s just so spot-on – it’s exactly how a blogger’s mind works.

EN · IT · KIDS · PHOTOGRAPHY

Useful uses of xplanet

2007/05/21 20:44

The planet Léon Originally uploaded by viralbus. I’ve spent a bit of time playing with xplanet after installing it. It just has so many features! First I discovered you can add clouds (and there are plenty of sites where one can download new clouds every couple of hours). Then I realised it’s always rendering all planets, and that the moon actually turns up if a solar eclipse is in progress. And today I realised any photo can be used to render the planet, including photos of kids.

EN · FOODDRINK · KIDS

Korma pizza

2007/05/20 23:26

A curry pizza Originally uploaded by viralbus. A few days ago, we had three types of curry with rice and naan bread for dinner. Most people would probably put the curry on top of the rice and put the naan on the side. But not Charlotte! She made herself a kind of pizza, taking care to use only meat and very little sauce to make it look neat and tidy. She loved it and ate it all. I’m not sure why – she’s normally into eating each […]

DIY · EN

Incompetence

2007/05/18 23:10

Photo30_2 Originally uploaded by isoLord. I have a boiler maintenance agreement with Scottish Gas. That means they’re supposed to come and check out my boiler once a year. For some reason, it wasn’t a problem the first year, but this year it’s proving almost impossible to get them round… They called me about it a few weeks ago. They tried to get me to commit to being at home for a full 12-6 afternoon slot, but I pointed out that wouldn’t be possible given that I have […]

EN · IT

Xplanet on Ubuntu

2007/05/12 16:12

Several years ago, I always used xearth to render my desktop background. However, when I started using Nautilus, it broke, and I never bothered to find a solution. Today I realised that xearth has been replaced by xplanet, and it’s available as an Ubuntu package. And it’s beautiful! However, the Nautilus problem remains: The window manager controls the background, so a program cannot write straight to it. The solution is to render a file and then ask Nautilus to reload it at regular intervals. Fortunately, somebody written […]

EN · LINGUISTICS

Phonetic survey

2007/05/11 23:49

Phonetics 101 1 Originally uploaded by Bullfrog117. John Wells is preparing the 3rd edition of the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (see more on his blog). For that purpose, he’s asking native speakers of English to complete this survey. It’s quite an interesting one, and I recommend reading it, even if you (like me) are not qualified to complete it. Question 20, alas, doesn’t work for speakers of Scottish English. I’m a bit surprised he hasn’t spotted that himself, given he’s the author of Accents of English (which I […]

EN · FOODDRINK

Spinach gazpacho and other food

2007/05/10 21:52

When Derek and Amanda came for dinner last Saturday, I used one of my favourite cookbooks for both the starter, a cold spinach soup, and the main course, veal chops in a pineapple/pine-nut/ginger sauce. Ever since I bought it (eight years ago according to Amazon), it’s been one of my favourite cookbooks when I want to cook something that isn’t too boring. It’s not that the recipes are difficult, but some of them take slightly longer and require a bit more attention than I can face after […]

EN · POLITICS · SCOTLAND

Did they really want what they wanted?

2007/05/09 18:18

I really find the LibDems’ behaviour in the Scottish Parliament very odd. They have more than any other party being the driving force behind introducing proportional representation, so I think they have a moral obligation to make it work. Instead, they’re now saying they will only enter a coalition with the largest party, or not at all. Furthermore, they refuse to negotiate with the largest party unless it gives up it’s main raison d’être in advance. Let’s look at these two points in more detail: It’s proper […]

ELECTION · EN · POLITICS · SCOTLAND

The aardvark strategy

2007/05/04 22:24

Aardvark: Just Nosing Around Originally uploaded by Tut99 (Roger). The election for the Scottish Parliament is over, and the results are finally in. I’m in a mixed mood. On the good side, Labour is not the largest party in Scotland any more, and they lost control with many councils, too. On the bad side, far too many votes were spoilt, the SNP and the LibDems don’t have a majority together, and Labour remained in control of Glasgow City Council. The most remarkable fact about the parliamentary election […]

ELECTION · EN · POLITICS · SCOTLAND

Election day

2007/05/02 22:45

I Voted Originally uploaded by stickerbandit. Election day is only eight and a half hours away now. The day we celebrate democracy! I personally hope Scotland will be ruled by an SNP/LibDem coalition after this election, and that Labour loses power in Glasgow, too. The best website for the Scottish election is probably Scotland Votes, and Vote Scotland for information about how to vote.

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