I’ve finally found something I actually really crave. It’s a book. The site it’s on also happens to be the best site I’ve seen for ages. Damm I love typographers. Check it out. Lineto.com
Briefly
In the seasonal song Twelve Days of Christmas people usually sing “Four calling birds” but the correct words are actually “Four Colley birds” an old name for blackbirds. Also, according to my Encyclopaedia of Superstition, anyone who eats a mince pie on every day of the twelve days of Christmas (26 December - 6 January) will enjoy twelve months of good fortune in the following year.
So, Dave Hartnett, the head of the Inland Revenue (or HMRC as they call themselves), has written a letter to seven million families offering a personal apology for his department’s losing of their personal details in the post. I bet the personal nature of the apology doesn’t extend to Mr Hartnett personally paying for seven million stamps.
Did you know that Taurine, the most significant ingredient in Red Bull and the other energy drinks underpinning modern life, is basically bile and is also found in bull semen? Huh? Did you?
The BBC are reporting that the exclusive, members-only torrent tracker Oink’s Pink Palace has been closed down. It’s a shame but to be honest I am surprised it has taken this long. The site had really strict rules about members having to upload as much music as they downloaded which meant that the range of material available and the speed at which it could be obtained was far better than any other site, including the iTunes store. Oink was a brief vision of how successful the music business could have been if they weren’t so greedy and stupid, no wonder it’s gone.
Are you unsure about what the recent changes to inheritance tax mean? If you jointly own a house worth more than £600,000 and you’re not married the new rules mean that there is now a significant financial reason to get married, unfortunately. There’s a very nicely written guide to the new rules on the Inland Revenue site. It’s in Question and Answer form and the characters of the Questioner and the Answerer are drawn out very nicely by the narrative arc, with some very panicky worries in the middle about losing essential paperwork in fires and robberies.
You get tired and irritable, your children annoy you. You tell them off about everything and stop them from doing the things they want to do. Your time with them becomes wearing and you long for some time to yourself. When they are finally in bed you are so glad that you stay up late enjoying your freedom instead of having the early night you need. Next day you wake up tired and irritable. Several life-times pass.
From Wired - Umberto Eco, the Italian semiologist, once famously compared Macs and PCs to the two main branches of the Christian faith: Catholics and Protestants.
The Mac is Catholic, he wrote in his back-page column of the Italian news weekly, Espresso, in September 1994. It is “cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the Kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed.”
The Windows PC, on the other hand, is Protestant. It demands “difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: A long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.”
My American cousins always used to think that the name of my home town, Leatherhead, was hilarious but not as extremely amusing as nearby Dorking. Now George Clooney has made a film called Leatherheads, it’s about American football. So my home town will be famous as a film title. This is bad news, but it could be worse, I suppose. At least Clooney’s not a complete idiot. At least it’s not a Disney movie.
OK. It’s fine for other children’s parents (2 today) to phone up asking me to collect their children, or deliver their children, or whatever, even if the reason is so that they can indulge their seedy money-making enterprises in property ownership and even though I had to skive off work early today just so that I could collect my own children. It’s a bit annoying that they want me to call them back on their mobile phones, at peak rates, to discuss the arrangements. It’s more than annoying when they won’t allow the conversation to end quickly because they feel guilty and want to blather on about this and that to make themselves feel better, at my expense. Flame off.