Igenlode Wordsmith

My electronic scales (used for very fine measurements -- I use an ordinary balance and set of weights for cooking!) were mysteriously not working *again*, what feels like only a few months after I had to replace the battery last time, and despite barely having been used in the interim. They don't have an off-switch, so cannot have been accidentally left on long-term; they always time out after five minutes or so. I am not impressed by the longevity of the "+70% Extra Life" Duracell batteries ("Baby Safe With Repulsive Taste") that I was sold.

( Special screwdriver required )

I was also displeased to discover that the latch on my bathroom door has malfunctioned for a third time, making it impossible to keep the door shut -- just in time for the chilly season :-(
( Read more... )

I spent an incredibly frustrating hour at lunchtime trying to teach a woman how to knit -- I have never known anyone so utterly fail to *understand* the process before. ( She just could not *see* the basic principle of how it was supposed to work )

The wind has swung round from its prevailing southwesterly direction (about 80-90% of the time) to blow pretty much dead east. Which may mean a welcome change in the weather, although the forecast is for more stiflingly hot days, but unfortunately means that there are now low-flying aircraft making their final landing approach every two to three minutes, which is sufficient to render spoken Russian at least completely unintelligible -- I simply can't fill in the 'missing bits' the way that I automatically do with English. And I can't very well shut the windows, because it's boiling hot indoors and I'm desperately trying to flush the day's accumulated heat out now that the sun has at last gone down outside.

It gives you an insight into the level of educational disruption proverbially experienced by pupils of schools under a regular flightpath :-(

I went to my GP because I was told that I really ought to get a mysterious pain in my left hand checked out which has been troubling me since before Christmas -- I have been putting it off because I know that you have to jump through a vast number of hoops to see a doctor nowadays, and I always try to avoid doing so for anything that might go away of its own accord. I went to the GP surgery in person to try to book an appointment in the hopes of being able to simplify the process.

( telephone tennis ) Well, I feel vindicated; it wasn't worth the effort (and when the telephone assessment eventually comes I shall probably be given a brush-off -- I can't even inflict pain on myself by deliberately prodding and poking at the area at the moment, which makes remote diagnosis pretty much impossible).

I might as well have sat at home with my intermittent stabs of Something Wrong and let the doctors get on with the patients who actually do need urgent help, as opposed to wasting everybody's time, including my own...

I think
a few words
however deep
however heartfelt
do not transmute
by some newline alchemy
into poetry
merely by layout.

(That may be superficially 'deeper' than the sort of tumty-tum doggerel I can also turn out with slightly more difficulty, but it is so trivially easy that I don't believe it counts.)

Splitting your sentence in lines down the page
And calling it poetry fills me with rage;
I admit the existence of blank verse and prose,
But free verse is more tricky than either of those.

We are being deluged in local election literature here, especially by the Liberal Democrats, who have evidently decided to make a big push in this area. And they are driving me up the wall by constantly and presumably consciously repeating the same outright lie and associated graph showing voting figures 'at the last election' -- "together we can stop the Tories from winning here".

( Read more... )The impression I get is that, whatever their national political stance, the local party consists of cynical, opportunistic liars who will do anything to get into power... and as that is the view that the majority of the general public currently holds about all politicians, it is more than a little unfortunate to find them actively living up to it :-(

Thinking about the phenomenon of Young Adult books, plus the angsty I-want-to-see-my-social-problems-represented fiction I've seen so much of among amateur writers of that generation recently... I can't help wondering, when did this need start?

Because when I was their age, the *last* thing I wanted was to see squirmy adolescent behaviour in the books I was reading. I had absolutely no difficulty whatsoever in identifying whole-heartedly with the heroes of my favourite adventures, none of whom had much in common with me -- and 'children's authors' like Rosemary Sutcliff had no qualms about depicting protagonists who were functioning adults. ( Read more... )

It's so irritating when people promote urban myths ("Did you know that...") without the slightest attempt to check dates, probability or scientific fact.

"Did you know that Jane Eyre is fanfic of Jane Austen's Emma?" (I traced this one back to a fan conspiracy-theory about similar names published circa 2007, but I've seen it repeated several times recently as proof of academic respectability.)

"Did you know that the only reason vampires have no reflection is that mirrors used to be backed with silver?" (Both mirrors and vampires pre-date the silvered-glass process; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mirrors were backed with tin/mercury.)

I *know*, intellectually speaking, that most people will repeat as gospel truth whatever they read on the Internet, and that the average comprehension age of the great British public is about nine years old. But it's scary to see it in action :-(

I've been trying to identify just why I find the current Andrew Davies adaptation for "Les Misérables" so unsatisfying, which is hard to put into words without coming across as just another 'oh no, he dared to alter one word of the Sacred Text' rant. Save that it happens to be several years since I reread the book (for the purposes of writing my AU-Cosette story), and what I'm getting are feelings of general wrongness which turn out to be corroborated when I do go to look up the relevant sections of the novel, but are not the sort of verbatim recall that can identify every little deviation.

See, I do know about adaptation. I understand perfectly well that you can't reproduce even something as short as the first Harry Potter book on screen in every detail exact as it was printed (and in fact, those films might have been better films if they'd been a bit less constrained by the anticipated expectations of millions of screaming fans). Putting a novel on screen is a question of conveying the spirit of the story, not every incident, and that often involves writing new scenes between the characters or else streamlining bits of the plot because internal agonising doesn't come over well on screen (or simply to shorten it).

But what I'm getting from this adaptation is the sense of a writer who thinks he is taking the chance to improve on the perceived deficiencies of the original. ( Read more... )

Typing up a 'memoir' as a favour to an old acquaintance, consisting almost entirely of a recital of holiday destinations -- all of which are summarised as 'very interesting' with the exception of a new car park and shopping centre which rose to the rank of 'totally amazing' -- plus a deadpan litany of intervening deaths of friends and relatives, 'but life goes on'. I now know the names of a great many travel companies and the en suite status of a good many bathrooms, but practically nothing else.

Unbelievably boring stuff -- like typing out years of somebody's engagement diary, which is where I suspect is exactly where most of it came from.