And all we have to worry about is cancelled flights?

This volcano’s gone a bit Susan Cooper.

Lindisfarne – Clear White Light

Is an amazing song.

Firebird & Nightingale

Well on the way to cometing my second draft. Write up of a whole host of scribbled notes is now done, fucker is currently standind at about 93,000 words. Have now got a number of changes to go through, all involving very dull things like capitalisation, fonts, use of italics and multiple names.

Then one that’s complete, I get the joy of working on an agent pack.

Woo.

And, indeed, whoo.

Let’s celebrate with a Lego model of Geordi la Forge.

SFX’s Top 25 Scribbles

SFX have just published their top 25 Science Fiction and Fantasy books. You definitely won’t be surprised by the winner, but there are a few eyebrow raisers. Narnia didn’t do too well, and the absence of Gormenghast, The Dark Is Rising and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is oddness indeed. But it’s a solid list, the right Harry Potter book made it up there (Prisoner of Azkaban) and there’s grim satisfaction to be had noting that His Dark Materials trounced The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Take a look...

New Who.

Hot on the heals of David Tennant still managing to bring a tear to my eye, despite being forced to leave in an embarrassingly bad two parter, comes the BBC trailer for the next series of Dr Who. I'll definitely miss Tennant (and Russell T Davies too for that matter) and I'm a little concerned that Steven Moffat is the man taking over (because while his Who stuff has been ace, I was never a fan of Coupling) but what the hell, I'm officially excited.




And to add extra excitement is the continuing rumour than Neil Gaiman shall be giving us an episode. It may be false, but there's still hope. And this of course leads nicely in to Statuesque, which is rather good, and is now on the internet. I'd feel guilty about sticking this up, but he's already put it on his own blog, so I don't. Enjoy.

That's The Way To Do It.

Mad Men Yourself

Like so.




The charming fellows were even kind enough to provide a date.

Spirit Tracks.

Zelda seems to have popped her clogs.

Possible Roger Rabbit II.

Please, please, please, please, please, please, please...

X-Rated Disney.

Well, not quite, but a bit raunchy. And palpably not actually by Disney.

I don't mind admitting I had a couple of crushes on Disney guys when I was a kid, notably Prince's Philip (Sleeping Beauty) and Eric (The Little Mermaid) respectively. Filthy minded beast I was I still never pictured them quite like this...

Jam Talks About U2.

And his good friend Bongo.

The Thick Of It.

Looking good...

Well... I'm done!

My dissertation is finished, handed it in last week, can be seen here if anybody's actually interested.

Bit of a mixed time otherwise though, the past weeks have included Ian's funerals, and finding out I'm likely to loose my job next month (and then more recently finding out I may not be). On the other hand I did climb a mountain.

I climbed Helvellyn as part of Jamie's stag do, which was a bit of a surprise since as far as I was concerned we were going for a high altitude walk before the drinking commenced. Lovely surprise to find myself climbing a mountain, two hours in to a six hour hike. A perfect time to find I have a problem with heights.

Still, I've been able to catch up on all the other stuff in the past few days, happily the new Terry Pratchett and Bernard Cornwell books both came out pretty much on the day I handed the accursed thing in. Read Unseen Academicals in a weekend, The Burning Land shall soon follow.

Had my proper celebration the weekend just gone, been in London to see Andy's new play and now I'm desperately in need of sleep. because tomorrow all those fun things like learning driving theory, applying for jobs, and finding out where I've left my bloody glasses can begin. Though, and I'm looking forward to this a bit more, I'm also going to start work on the second draft of my book.

Went for a walk.

One of the benefit's of living out in Wylam has been the decent walks immediately on hand, a benefit which goes tits up the minute the evenings (and soon enough late afternoons) get dark. Moreso right now because all of the surrounding fields have been ploughed up. Went out briefly tonight, had a wonder through some woods, got the shit scared our of me several times by some birds, scratched my hand, got stung by nettles, muddied my shoes, nearly hung myself on a weird bundle of metal wire in thicket, and almost ripped my coat climbing a barbed wire fence. Marvellous really.

I then found myself in a field, right next to my house, and because I'd never actually been in it before (which is weird, now I'm thinking about it) I didn't realise it was my house at first. Got the crap scared out of me (again) by a couple of deer, who jumped out of the long grass and pelted away, little orange buggers. Then I turned around, realised it was suddenly quite dark and I had about quarter of an hour until it went all "don't go out on the moors".

Took the opportunity to listen to some of the Silmarillion whilst wondering, lets just say it works better as an audiobook. The levels of incomprehensibility are somewhat reduced by Martin Shaw's narration, and walking in woods similar to those I imagine Tolkien composed much of his mythology in does help. There was a very peculiar moon this evening as well, which was nice, it looked like one you get in the prettier anime films. I tried to take a picture but it didn't come out well.

Thought for the day: fuck, the Beatles did all that in eight year?

A diet drink I would consider.

Things.

Good news: Stephen Fry, it seems, has finished a book, which is always something to look forward to. The Hippopotamus is still his best, but for how long?

Bad news: Keith Waterhouse, aka the man who gave us the Association for the Annihilation of the Aberrant Apostrophe (not to mention Billy Liar), has died.

Envious news: Neil Gaiman has let some internet types photograph his basement library, and quite unfeasibly huge it is too. Smaller but sexier is his second library (in the same house), where he keeps his reference books. Wow.

Petition for a posthumous apology to Alan Turing.

Worth a look, really. Seeing as the poor man, who should be a national hero, was chemically castrated as the only alternative to prison.

From the petition.

Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think.

He was also gay. He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated as a 'cure', and took his own life, aged 41.

The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment and recognize that his work created much of the world we live in and saved us from Nazi Germany. And an apology would recognize the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended this man's life and career.

Shaw quote.

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." George Bernard Shaw

One to memorise I think.

The Owl Service.

A chance discovery of the full series on DVD at Newcastle Central Library has got me hooked on The Owl Service, an adaption of Alan Garner's book of the same name.

I brought it home (as I often do with these series) in the hopes that it might turn out to be that bloody series I vaguely remember from being a kid with the golder masks and the waterfalls, but it hasn't.

Still, even taking the late sixties production into account (actually, that helps with the atmosphere if I'm honest, makes it look a little bit Wicker Man) it's very very good, which I should have expected considering it's by Garner. A mixed cast*, but interestingly filmed, and with some beautiful ideas. I think the book is definitely worth a look.

*Michael Holden, the Welsh boy who plays Rhys (on the left in the below picture), in particular impresses. I tried looking him up, expecting to have seen him do at least moderately well, only to find he died eight years after in rather unpleasant circumstances.

Can you do...

...my little film quiz?

(Made during breaks in reading through horrid notes on horrid industrial documents.)