Sto editando

1. So I'm thinking of designing a little "editavi" badge which only people who have edited stuff in dead languages are allowed to wear, and when we pass each other in the streets we could doff our hats and nod with pain in our eyes. It would have a little lion on it in reference to St Jerome because he ought to be the patron saint of editors for obvious reaons, but also because editing and writing a commentary often feels to me a bit like kneeling in a wilderness while bashing yourself with stones.

2. The Pet Shops' most recent hit was the excellent song "I'm With Stupid", which was about the Blair-Bush special relationship, but transformed into a rather poignant and tender love story. The video by Walliams and Lucas has an air of a long-harboured fan fantasy and is a bit distracting from the song, but nonetheless quite good. Have to love Walliams' teeth.


3. My initial enthusiasm for being able to tag files and have transparent things on my desktop has entirely dissipated. Vista is clunky rubbish and it keeps stopping letting me do frivolous things like, say, typing, so that it can freeze up the whole system with some mysterious activity of its own. Every now and then it claims to lose contact with the USB pen I work off and actually deletes from the pen the file I have open, and I could believe that that's the USB pen's fault except that almost as often it claims to lose contact with the desktop, my default position for emergency saves of open material just randomly removed from my pen drive, and then won't save anything at all, even a recovered-work file, and I am now reduced to taking screen shots of what's visible behind all the open dialogue boxes and notifications and actually retyping it from the picture. If it is painful to write an analysis of the sources of a proem then doing it again is like scratching your nails on a blackboard. I'm told I need to strip my machine down and reinstal everything. Techie people always say that sort of thing, but isn't partially working computer in the hand something to hold on to? I have fear. There's no way I'm deleting the operating system from my computer, and I don't think I'd let anyone else do it either.

4. You have to love Kirsty Gallacher, the one dissenting voice at the Sex and the City premiere according to the guardian. " "I didn't really enjoy it very much," she said, with disarming frankness. "My friends loved the series and I went with a couple of them and they loved the film. But I'm afraid I don't get it. I found it very lightweight, very annoying and quite depressing at times. I'd rather read a history book." " Sex and the City was always entertaining if you only half paid attention but if you thought about it too seriously ever it was just depressing, as KG points out. They were all annoying and insubstantial people with odd goals. The book was better, because more unusual. But I don't understand all these women who seemed to think that the TV program gave them permission to have female friends and made it all ok -- why ever did they need the validation of an American sitcom in order to conduct their friendships? The most positive thing to be said about Sex and the City is that it was obviously way better than Ally McBeal. In Futurama Ally McBeal was reenacted as Single Female Lawyer -- Bender sang the theme tune "Single Female Lawyer, fighting for her clients, wearing sexy miniskirts and being self-reliant" -- but I don't think they ever did a Sex and the City episode. Futurama changed my life -- it's so rare to see relationships between space-ship crews conducted in such an honest way on screen. Anyway now I'm off to write a history book for Kirsty Gallacher.