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Showing posts from July, 2007

Hummer

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I saw one of these in Station Road, Hebburn today. What a prick you'd have to be to want to drive it round the streets of Tyneside. 4x4s, SUVs are sad enough, but this is operatic in the extent of the personal tragedy involved in forking out thousands to own a car suited to the nastier suburbs of Baghdad.

Idioticons

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Whilst doing some research on the question of whether emoticons can be considered to be cohesive devices, I came across this .

The 1000 word marker...

Was passed today . Should have its back broken by the weekend.

Clare and Toby: 45 minutes old

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Grandson

Toby was born at 12.28pm today. 8lb 10oz. Mother and baby both doing well.

Cauliflower Galore

And our freezer's on the blink. So I've been examining the question of pickling .

There is a reason for posting this when I should be working...

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And that is, photos from the Wellcome Trust form the starting point of the discourse analysis I'm undertaking. Look at: https://wellcomeimages.org/ That is all. [edited 15/07/2017]

Busy

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No, that's not really me. Though I used to wear a hat like that in the 80s. I'm not going to blog for two or three weeks because I've really got to get down to some serious writing for an MA assignment. All the action will be taking place at the academic blog. Later...

Unrepentant...

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Owsley... has also not joined the ranks of the penitent psychedelicists who look on their experiences as youthful indiscretions. Good for him. Owsley, n. An extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD; a tablet of this. Freq. attrib., esp. as Owsley acid. [1967 Narcotics & Hallucinogenics II. 115 Owsley's Stuff{em}LSD manufactured by Owsley Stanley.] 1968 T. WOLFE Electric Kool-aid Acid Test xv. 212 The most famous, among the heads, were the ‘Owsley blues’{em}with a picture of Batman on them... In fact..the hippest intelligence one could pass around was that one was in possession of ‘Owsley acid’. 1968 D. A. LEVY Suburban Monastery Death Poem, Camels packing Opium & hash & owsleys unlimited Underneath the bar. 1971 ‘E. MCBAIN’ Hail, Hail, Gang's All Here ii. 170 There's a whole lot of difference between white owsley and green flats. 2002 Ministry Jan. 67/3 ‘Happenings’ were the rage: loads of tripping beautiful people high on legendary Owsley acid.

I'll be back after a few more thousand words...

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'private jets for climate change'

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Al's saying something about Madonna's chest being immune from the effects of age, as well as climate change, I think... What a load of old toot. All things connected with climate change have begun to take on a week-old halibut like scent of secular religiosity. The organisers and participants in Live Earth seem to be saying we need to "raise awareness" of climate change. Well, we don't. Who, pray tell, isn't aware of it? And anyway, what fucking difference does it make? I'll come clean here and say that I'm an enthusiastically "green": the beer cans, and wine bottles and newspapers all go in the black box to be collected by the council. Food scraps get composted. I grow a lot of our food on the allotment, anyway. I go to work on public transport. I've not been on an aeroplane in two years. But I have no illusions whatsoever: my lifestyle makes fuck all difference to the big picture, whilst millions of obese people in the US dri

As much as that?

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Pigeons! Why?

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I went to get some perspex sheets yesterday from the allotment of a pigeon fancier. Nice bloke, but the place fucking stunk. You can't eat them. And they don't lay edible eggs. I can see that there'd be a thrill in waiting for your birds to fly back from miles away, but it can't be worth plodging around in all that shit. And you can get a nasty disease .

As one door closes...

...Another one slams shut in your face. That defrag didn't work after all. So Herself's laptop has been resurrected and reformatted. Hmm. The last few days at work now before my "holiday"; (during the first week of that we're getting a damp proof course, so what with 5000 words of discourse analysis and all the DIY, it should be a barrel of laughs). This feels like it's been a very long spring term. Several members of staff at my college clearly need to piss off out of education for several weeks because they're fractious, bad tempered, and unpleasant to work with; (actually, a number of them should piss off out of education permanently - but maybe that's just me being carnaptious).
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procrastination defragmented

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How could I just forget to defrag the computer? And it really was horribly fragmented: splattered all over the hard drive, as if my files had been put into a shotgun and fired at it. Anyhow, it’s done now, and thanks to Monaxle for pointing out what should have been bloody obvious, even to a numpty like me, (I used to defrag it in Libya, simply to have something to do, ffs!). Also some other PC housekeeping. And now, I can procrastinate no longer: I’ve to start serious work on 5000 words of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. I’ll be examining the use of cohesive devices in internet discussion threads, and the implications for ESL learners. I’ve got a month off work. So Happy Holidays. Thankyou.

ʇxǝʇ buıddı1ɟ

I don't know why anyone would want to do it, but here's a place where you can type in text and have it inverted. Where's it all going to end? Or should I say:¿puǝ oʇ buıob 11ɐ ʇı s,ǝɹǝɥʍ

Keeping a sense of proportion

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We're renovating a garden shed which once doubled as a kind of shed/conservatory. Properly called a potting shed, perhaps? Anyhow, I'm trying to plan the proportions, before buying timber and perspex... The right hand side is what's left of the shed bit, and is exactly 6' high. The base is 4'. I want the left hand side to be 4' high because that's the size the sheets of perspex come in (6'x4', actually). The question is, how long is that diagonal?

A sad moment...

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365 Days VIII , originally uploaded by /pɪgstaɪævnjuː/ . I bought my laptop in May 2004. It's seen a lot of action, particularly journeying to and fro to Libya, and spending 15 months in that country, where very fine dust is everywhere. It's been my principal conduit to the virtual world for three years. I've learned to touch type on it, written God knows how many thousand words on it. I processed photos on it from Libya, from our wedding, from Molly's christening. And now it's going west. It's like an old man. Just booting up takes forever, and the hard drive is constantly working. IT rund very hot. Everything is so slow - it can take half an hour to write a short email. Blogging, academic writing and processing photos are now out of the question; (I'm writing this at work). So the time has come to put it out of the way. Most of the data on it has been backed up now. I'll use Herself's laptop for the time being. *sighs*