RIP Kenelm

I'm away for a few days, but I've had sad news from Devon: my mother tells me that Kenelm was not improving, and they had him put to sleep yesterday. I was sort of expecting this. Although he was very sweet, and tried hard, watching him struggle was only really justifiable if there was a chance his struggling would get him somewhere eventually. They've put Dorcas back into the main herd, where she can get back into the old routine.

But Chloe has had her baby now. My mother says that he was such a contrast to poor Kenelm, on his feet and suckling within the hour, and then dashing around the field crazily, that they have called him Kinetic. (All the alpacas this year will have K-names.) I'm looking forward to seeing him when I get back.

It's very strange camping out in my Cambridge flat, which is hopefully going to be sold soon. I lived here for thirteen years, almost twice as long as I have lived in any other home. I feel like it would be healthy to be a bit nostalgic, but I can't quite muster the energy. It's a nice flat, but owning somewhere you don't live is a bit of a worry.

The anti-English Defence League march went past here earlier today. I was a bit disappointed with it because it was rather hatey. Admittedly the EDL are pretty hateable, but I think a happy peaceful march would have made a better contrast. They were shouting "EDL, go to hell" as they went down here, and then singing, really badly, an anti-EDL song to the tune of She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain. I think there were clashes and a few arrests later at Silver Street.

In other news: a lovely never-released Rachel Stevens/Richard X song; Bill Bailey covers Metallica; and the Parisians have made what they describe as "une curieuse anamorphose végétale" outside L'Hotel de Ville, presumably so they can stand on it and pretend to be Le Petit Prince.

Short video of Kenelm and Dorcas

Kenelm had got out into the rain so I went out to put him back in the shelter, and filmed him for a few moments with Dorcas.  She wasn't quite sure what I was there for.  Watch her check him over after he makes a little squeaky hum noise about 6 seconds in.

He's a sweetheart, I do hope he gets on OK.

Kenelm update

Kenelm is still with us, and I'm beginning to hope that he perhaps might make it after all.  He still can't quite stand up properly, but he does manage to lurch a few steps at a time, and he seems to be getting a little bit better over time.  This morning my parents took him off to the vet for a consultation, rather expecting that they wouldn't bring him back.  But the vet thinks it's worth persevering.  At the moment he gets fed from a bottle every few hours, but we think he's probably also suckling a little by himself.  And he does seem to be getting stronger.  So, cautious optimism here...

Kenelm back with Dorcas

Dorcas has got her baby Kenelm back, and it was very touching to see.  I don't suppose she'd been waiting by the gate all night, but she was there in the morning.  He's still not able to stand up but otherwise he's quite perky.  I don't give much for his chances, really, but at least he's still around now.  The thing that speaks most for him is that my mother has not given up on him yet.  She's really uncannily good at knowing when it's time to prepare yourself for animal death.  She has a harness which we use for hanging baby alpacas from luggage scales to weigh them, and she's got Kenelm to suckle from Dorcas by holding him up in that.  So now the plan is that we take it in turns to go out and hold him up to suckle every three hours.  (This will really be so much easier than bottle-feeding.)  And hope that his legs sort themselves out as he gains strength.  We'll probably need to feed Dorcas too, who is staying with Kenelm instead of grazing.

It's not looking good

Unfortunately little Kenelm has not managed to stand up, let alone suckle.  My mother thinks there's some problem with one of his hind legs.  He's gone off to the vet's with a bottle of plasma (which is spun from alpaca blood, and is a sort of baby alpaca buck-you-uppo), but to be honest, it's not looking likely that he's going to thrive.  It's very sad whenever a baby alpaca dies but the bit I find worst is the behaviour of the mother if we have to take the baby away.  I think I've mentioned before that alpacas are on the whole a little wary of us, but are usually pretty cooperative when there's something wrong.  They seem to get the idea that we are agents of change, and useful to have around in a crisis.  When you take an alpaca baby away to the vet (and probably slightly fewer of these ever come back than don't) the mother makes concerned noises, but essentially doesn't stop you.  And then she waits by the paddock gate, making enquiring sounds, and catching your eyes whenever you look out of the windows.  If you go up to her she peers very intently into your eyes, as if trying to read some message there.  I remember one alpaca whose baby died at the vet's stood for ages by the gate, bleating at us every time we went near.  Maybe I'm reading too much into it; but it's the way that the noises they make at us aren't angry noises, but distressed or asking noises, that I find sad.  I do hope that we'll be able to reunite Kenelm and Dorcas.  She's standing at the gate right now, looking for him.

It's that time of year again

When I lived in Cambridge, the sun on the Cam always gave me a reflex stress reaction.  Beautiful weather meant I should be revising, or marking things, or just that the year was ending sooner than it felt like it should, plus suddenly there would be irritating undergraduates wandering the streets in black tie without shame, and I had to put all that extra effort into not hating them.  Devon has different stresses.  In June my parents start fretting about getting the hay in (hay news: it's nearly all in now, and there isn't too much less than last year) and every day my mother says "I really think XXX is going to have her baby today".  Whichever alpaca XXX might be, she laughs at this prediction for weeks on end, until I am alone in the house and then she goes into labour as quickly and incorrectly as possible.  Here if you want it is video footage of me discovering this morning's problem.  Caution!  I swear in this video.  I don't swear very often but when I do it's justified.

The baby's head and one front leg are out, but one leg isn't, and I know from last time that this means that the head and leg have to go back inside and come out again properly, with the other leg.  Not only am I a little squeamish about greasing up and doing the Herriot thing, I also know that alpaca legs are long and twig-like, there's not much room for manouevre in there, and that if you break its leg you've pretty much killed it. Plus there's the possibility of suffocating the baby if it's already breathing.  Anyway, I didn't even try to do it myself, I just called the vet.  Two of them arrived about thirty minutes later and within seconds they had sorted everything out.  Hurray for vets! The baby is a boy called Kenelm.  As I type I can see him making vague attempts to stand up.  But they both look in reasonably good shape, so as long as he's on his feet and suckling by nightfall hopefully this story will have a happy ending.

And, because nature is both great and disgusting at the same time, I have just seen my first ever Red Kite in Devon, circling above our paddock, presumably lured by the scent of fresh afterbirth.  Buzzards have such a stronghold here that Kites are much more rare in Devon than they are in, say, Swindon.  Exciting stuff.  (Thankfully my mother is back now so it's up to her to go out with a bucket and spade or alternatively just leave the afterbirth out for a sky burial.)

Some things I read in May and June

I didn't post about what I'd read in May, mostly because I didn't read a lot in May, but also because I was too lazy.  I've read rather more in June, though I am still only halfway through The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose.  It's quite interesting but it moves quickly, so I only really get what he's talking about if it's something I've encountered before, and he makes some great things, for example imaginary numbers, sound much duller than they are.

1. I reread the first Flavia de Luce mystery and then read the next two. (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, and A Red Herring Without Mustard, by Alan Bradley.)  They're excellent unsentimental murder-mysteries about a precocious girl growing up in genteel deprivation after the war.  Flavia is ten or eleven and a bit of a terror.  She lost her mother as a baby and her father has been emotionally absent ever since, while her older sisters bully her to keep her down (at least partly in self-defence).  She's intelligent and bratty and obsessed with poisons.  It's a bit I Capture the Castle but without all that love stuff and with a lot more about fatal toxins.  Go Flavia de Luce!  I hope she escapes to a proper school, or at least eventually to Newnham.

2. I read two wry and quite funny books, Elinor Lipman's Dearly Departed, and Kate Christiansen's The Great Man.  I think Lipman is excellent but I like some of her books more than others.  This was definitely one of the good ones.  Christiansen is a completely new one on me.  It took me a while to get used to her style, but I ended up really enjoying it.

3. I worked through the whole of Wilfrid Hodge's Logic: an Introduction to Elementary Logic.  I don't really feel like reviewing it so much as reviewing myself.  My review reads: "Well done me!"  It may seem conceited to review myself in that way but wouldn't it be more conceited to imply that textbooks on elementary logic are something I just crunch up casually?  There are a few small errors in it.  A list of most of them can be found in a pdf linked to from this page on the Oxford Philosophy website, but I think I found a few more.  I made a note of them on this page.

Books as objects

Imagine a teenage girl without much money who has run out of things to read, browsing the shelves of the sort of charity shop where they sell paperbacks cheaply (not Oxfam).  She spots a book called The Deptford Trilogy and likes the cover, or the blurb, or the fact that it's a lot of book for not much money.  She buys it, reads it, and starts a life-long appreciation for Robertson Davies, an author who is underappreciated in the UK, and this brings her great pleasure.

It's a nice story.  So why, when I spotted The Deptford Trilogy in a box of books I was taking to a charity shop for my brother and sister-in-law, did I pounce on it so avidly and remove it?  I have my own copy.  This is not sensible behaviour.  I'm a big fan of Davies so I ought to want other people to get the chance to read his work.  A book for sale in a cheap charity shop is almost a better way of promoting things than giving them out for free, because the small cost involved gives the buyer an investment in reading the thing.  I could have helped some more poor kid marooned in Tiverton to discover one of the best writers of the twentieth century.  There are some books which I even find myself compulsively buying whenever I see them in secondhand bookshops or charity shops.  I find it almost impossible to pass by a copy of G. V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, for example.  But I would love nothing more than to meet someone who had read that and enjoyed it like I did, and when I remove a copy from circulation I make that less and less likely.  I remember how great it was when I first met Ray Page, emeritus Bosworth and Toller Professor of Anglo-Saxon, to find that we had read many of the same obscure things, like The Wallet of Kai Lung.  But I don't think I know anyone else who is a fan of G. V. Desani.  Maybe I should dig out my spare copies and start distributing them.

I found Robertson Davies by accident as a sixth-former because I had a book token to spend and the shop was just about to close.  I grabbed The Deptford Trilogy because at the time the word Deptford meant only one thing to me, the mysterious and sordid death of Christopher Marlowe.  I had a big literary crush on Marlowe and was writing a long essay about him for my A-level English.  Although I think The Cornish Trilogy is marginally better, I love The Deptford Trilogy because I found it so randomly, and because when I first read it I had no idea who the Bollandists were.  The narrator Dunstan Ramsay is very proud of publishing with the Bollandists despite not being a Catholic priest.  And six or seven years later, I too published something in Analecta Bollandiana, even though I am so far from being a Catholic priest that I am actually a Protestant woman.  Hurray!

Some interesting stuff

This video (off of Boing Boing) shows a 3D printer which is entirely solar powered, and sits in the desert printing sand into glass.

This sixteenth-century mechanical monk is disturbing.

This song called Magic has quite a magical video (off of popjustice):

PS re: Britney

Also does anyone know what's going on in the Britney video where the driver pours milk all over his head?  Is that a thing now?  If it's something rude please tell me euphemistically, or in Latin.

Some videos and a thought

1. Maybe I should have a tumblr not a blog.  If I had a tumblr not a blog then this paragraph could be an entire entry instead of needing bulking out with videos.  But if I had a tumblr not a blog then this paragraph would not exist!  Therefore I have no need of a tumblr.  QED.

2. This person is going to tell us all about Plato's views on the holiness of objects... or is he?  Watch the video, it's only 37 seconds long.

I bet this man has received at least one proposal of marriage as a direct result of that YouTube clip, like those cat engineers.

3. Britney is good at music and good at music videos, even if her decision to use her latest to reposition herself as a sex pest is in some ways an odd one:

I remember the first time I ever heard about her, before I heard any of her music, she was described as having a vocal range like Whitney and being a postergirl for all that supremely-creepy True-Love-Waits stuff.  In some ways it's surprising that they don't still use her as a postergirl.  "Look what happened to Britney when she discovered sex!" they could say, and scare young girls into going to parties with their fathers.  If she'd had more of a normal teenagerhood I expect she'd be a bit better balanced now, poor thing.

Bensons

I found E. F. Benson's Dodo when it was deaccessioned from my local library. I think I was about 14 or 15. I really liked it and for a while it was one of my favourite books. It's the sort of thing that people are often sneery about now, but it was a big sensation in its day, not least because it was supposedly based on Margot Tennant, soon to be Lady Asquith. E. F. Benson went on to write the Mapp and Lucia books, which everyone loves, but also great underrated novels like Secret Lives and Paying Guests. Imagine if Jane Austen went really bitchy, and stopped bothering to write about people under the age of about 35 -- like if Pride and Prejudice were about Mrs Bennett and Mrs Lucas (Charlotte's mother) instead of about Elizabeth and Jane. I would put E. F. Benson only a little way behind P. G. Wodehouse in the great comic novelists stakes.

I've just finished reading a very good book about E. F.'s mother, As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil: the Impossible Life of Mary Benson by Rodney Bolt. She had to deal with her many precocious offspring (they all wrote books constantly) at the same time as ministering to their father, Archbishop of Canterbury E. W. Benson, who creepily proposed to her when she was just twelve years old. She seems to have been quite a remarkable person. Let's admit that it wasn't so difficult in those days to be a lesbian, because no one batted an eyelid at two women sharing a bed, but nonetheless well done Mrs Benson, who juggled lots of different lives, none of them really her own, without falling into despair more than occasionally. Here is the first sentence:

On Sunday, 11 October 1896, Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, insufferable to the end, died on his knees in church saying the Confession, ending a life of relentless success.

One of the interesting things about this book is that E. W., who was a sort of pious vampire, seems to have been tolerant of his wife's need for close female companionship, understanding that it allowed her to carry out her difficult role as Mrs Archbishop. (Maybe their friend Queen Victoria did know what lesbianism was, but didn't legislate against it having seen its positive side.) Mary Benson was said by Gladstone to be the cleverest woman in Europe, and held her own as a society hostess at Lambeth Palace. Her children were not always easier than her husband. There's a brilliant scene where Mrs Benson gets her three literary sons to parody each others' styles, which each of the parodees in turn fails to find very amusing. But I also like the way that this author intersperses quotations from contemporary writings by the Bensons and others into his text. This quotation from Ruskin's divorce proceedings, quoted in the chapter where young Mary Benson first tries to adapt to the duties of being Edward's wife, is fantastic:

I married her, thinking her so young and affectionate that I might influence her as I chose, and make of her just such a wife as I wanted. It appeared that she married me thinking she could make of me just the sort of husband she wanted. I was grieved and disappointed in finding I could not change her, and she was humiliated and irritated at finding she could not change me. . . I soon began to observe characteristics which gave me so much grief and anxiety that I wrote to her father saying that there was slight nervous affection of the brain. [The principal cause of which] was her always thinking that I ought to attend her, instead of herself attending me.

Poor patient Ruskin, "grieved and disappointed", while his young wife is "humiliated and irritated"! And clearly teetering on the brink of insanity in expecting him to look after her.

Devon in June

There is nothing I know more like heaven than walking through Devon footpaths and country lanes on a warm breezy day in mid-June.  I took some photos and videos this morning as I walked down to Uffculme.

My mother asked me to count the female alpaca herd on the way.  They will soon number 23 and she wanted me to check that hadn't happened yet.  Here they all are having come down to meet me in the race, a long thin field which provides access to a lot of other fields:

Beth is indicating pretty strongly that it would be a good idea if I opened the gate and let them all into the adjacent field, where the grass is long and plentiful, since they have been in the lower field at the far end of the race for a couple of weeks now. I saw Beth being born -- she was actually the first alpaca born at ours -- and she was bolshy from the start. Now she's herd matriarch. I told her she'd have to take it up with my mum.

These fields are badger territory, crossed with lots of badger tracks and full of little holes they've started digging and then abandoned. I took some video of one of the tracks:


Beth was not that impressed by my attitude concerning the field.


Here is the hidden cost of beer festivals:

This was the field my parents lent for the parking. It's not as bad as it could be, but it's still going to take some time to recover. And here's a view back down the hill. The field with the pinkish tinge is the one Beth's so keen to get into.

You can see her point.  Actually I expect my mother will let them in there sometime this week.

The footpath to Uffculme goes through one of the fields my parents are keeping back for hay.  Everyone's been moaning about the dry weather, and what will the animals eat this winter, etc, but actually it looks pretty good to my ignorant eyes.  It was very beautiful waving in the wind so I tried to video it.  I'm afraid you'll have to forgive the noises the wind makes on my camera's microphone, and also that Youtube doesn't always play these things back very well:


This is everyone's favourite tree.  A lot of people consider sycamores to be weeds because they're hard to get rid of, but even those people love this tree.  There's a photo of it in the pub.  It's not unusual, it's just a really really good tree. 

Sometimes I worry that we're all too fond of this tree.

Down Corks Hill the hedges on either side of the lane are even taller than in most places, about nine feet high instead of about six.  Here's some cow parsley with bees, seen just as it looked as I walked underneath it.

The smell on Corks Hill was particularly ripe, a mixture of cow dung and meadowsweet, with a hint of a dead creature which I came across liquefying on the tarmac halfway down.  That's the countryside for you -- everything's very alive except for the things that are dead and even those are alive just in an unpleasant way.

Here are some ducks napping by the side of the river Culm, just at the edge of Uffculme.

The Culm joins the Exe further down.

Actually today was my birthday so I made like the Culm and headed into Exeter (only by bus not by flowing). I had lunch at Strada because it's a place where sometimes it's a bit like eating in Italy. Every now and then I miss Italy quite intensely for a moment but I'm rather ashamed of this because it's always to do with food, and even when I try to think of something non-food-related that I might miss my thoughts end up wandering back to some amazing aperitivo or fantastic little biscuits.

More about village life

The singer Joss Stone lives in our village, in the house where she grew up.  It's at the other end of the village from us, a little way out on the road to Honiton.  You may have seen this Guardian article saying that the police have arrested some people who are alleged to have been planning to attack or perhaps kidnap her.  At first I thought Well done those alert neighbours!  Then I read in the less-bashful Sun that both of the arrested men are black.  Anyway, the neighbours seem to have been quite right, and now there are journalists in the village.  Hopefully they will go away soon.

Brief news

1. I tasted all the beers at the Ashill Beer Festival except for those which had sold out by the time I got to them, fifteen out of the possible nineteen.  My favourite was Forge Brewery's Litehouse.  Now I am all beer-festivalled out.

2. I'm not in a position to get a dog but if I were I would ask for one from a litter of Labrador-Poodle crosses being born today in North Devon.  The breeder's blog has a link to a webcam.  She leaves the webcam up all through the puppies' youths and it's pretty addictive.

3. 3D printers now seem to be where laser printers were when I was a teenager, e.g. expensive for an individual but within reach of a small business or a serious hobbyist.  I really want one, but not for any good reason.  Just because it would be cool!  In the meantime there are services which will print things for you from your designs.

Nevermind the 80s, it's still acceptable in mid-Devon (and long may it remain so)

I went back to the beer festival with my brother and sister-in-law.  Everybody seemed to be there, even the lady who won't say the Peace in church but just sits with her arms crossed staring at the floor while everyone else shakes hands. The Thorvertones showed us that you can get away with covers pretty well if you just go up there and do them with confidence in your own style, and they rocked the village with their guitary versions of Personal Jesus and Don't You Want Me Baby.  People ranging in age from teenagers to the retired were walking like an Egyptian or doing the Timewarp -- it's been a while since I did the Timewarp, and I expect it will be a while before I do the Timewarp again.  Lots of people were really throwing themselves into that one -- "great thrusting, Ashill!" as the singer shouted between choruses. It's one of those occasions when you think that perhaps you've lost something through the amount of choice on offer in ordinary life.  I wouldn't go to an event like this in a city, but when it's next door in the middle of nowhere it seems foolish to miss it, and so everyone's there enjoying themselves together, while dogs scrounge bits of pork roast and children play complicated games of tag round the outside of the tents.  And goodness there was some creative dance going on -- some people seemed to be just trying to get their limbs as far away from their bodies as possible in unusual ways.  Hurray for mid-Devon!

What's more, I have now tasted all but two of the festival beers.  There's no point my trying to remember which they are right now, though I've got marks for them all on my tasting sheet.  Tomorrow's the last day so hopefully I'll finish them then and maybe put some notes up here.

Beer festival part 2a

Butcombe Gold, 4.4%

Eddystone, 4.3%

We took my little nephew down to the beer festival, and he had an amazing time pointing at the drummer (he plays drums himself, on his dad's drumkit) and then dancing around like a mad thing.  It was his first ever festival.  He begged bits of pork from his indulgent Grandad's roastie bap and danced round in circles until he fell over. He looked like he felt life just couldn't get any better that this.  I may have lost him to rock and roll -- a remedial series of Pet Shop Boys listening sessions may be required.  It was quite a good band, and he particularly enjoyed their version of Stairway to Devon.  Once he's gone to sleep we're most of us going back to hear a band called the Thorvertones.  My brother and sister-in-law know the drummer's mother, who goes to all of their gigs wearing a special t-shirt that reads "The Drummer's Mother".  And they know someone else who likes them so much they have a Thorvertones tattoo.  I rather like their website, which explains that they're a band who take what they do seriously so that you don't have to. If I drink enough beer I will request Toxic by Britney...

On the beer front I have now tried Butcombe Gold, which I found just a tad disappointing, its summeriness overpowered by a strong bitter aftertaste, but only because I had high expectations; Forge Brewery's Dark Horse, which was a very good darker beer, though not quite what I was in the mood for; and South Ham's Brewery's Eddystone, which is a very good light fresh beer, but not as lovely as yesterday's Litehouse.  Litehouse is currently my favourite.  The beer certainly helps with tolerance for cover versions -- right now from my desk I can hear the mid-evening band thumping out Tainted Love.

The importance of being middle class

I have to get my signature on a document witnessed.  The document specifies that the witness must have known me for at least two years, mustn't be retired or related to me, and must be in one of these professions: solicitor, bank manager, financial advisor, police officer, doctor or qualified nurse, head teacher, member of the clergy, accountant, vet, dentist, magistrate, or ranking officer in the armed forces. So if you're not a regular church-goer, and you and your pets have been blessed with good health, it must be necessary to be pretty middle class to sort this out -- after all you're asking for someone who actually knows who you are, not just someone who will check it's you signing, and not everyone is chums with bank managers and solicitors.  I think I'll be able to get it done by asking the vicar of a neighbouring parish, if I can track her down.  But then maybe only the middle class have life assurance policies relating to mortgages.  The passport regulations are a little bit easier -- even teachers and lecturers can sign those.

I was mulling over this need to be middle class when I opened the next thing in my post, a book on logic from Amazon.  I started reading it at once -- I think I'll enjoy it more once it gets onto the Maths and stops trying to do "real world" logical analysis of things people say at after-dinner speeches.  Here's one of the little exercises at the end of the first chapter, which you have to inspect for internal consistency:

Walter joined the friendly club two years ago, and has been one of its most loyal members ever since.  Last year he paid for the holidays of precisely those club members who didn't pay for their own holidays.

Whilst of course I'm familiar with that particular "he shaved others, himself he could not shave" paradox, I was bemused to read in the answers at the back that this statement is inconsistent because of the question of who paid for Walter's holiday.  I had just assumed that Walter would avoid this excessive amount of self-definition by not going on holiday, especially if he has to work hard to pay for the holidays of others.  Since when has it been assumed that everyone goes on holiday?  Is that now an intrinsic part of human existence?  The fact that I can't read something like this without being really annoyed and even stopping to blog about it makes me worry that I am just over-educated, and that the excellence of the teaching in my first degree has spoiled me for normal just-let-it-go life.  But surely if one's allowed to pick pedantic holes in anything it's a textbook on logic.

Village life

Forge Litehouse, 4.3%

Teignworthy Old Moggie, 4.4%

One of the ways in which this village is great is its annual beer festival. There can't be many villages this small that have one. It's on all this weekend in the village hall, a few minutes' walk away, and one of the alpacas' fields has been turned into a carpark for the occasion. It started at about 6pm, and the sound of samba drums lured me away from my desk. Unfortunately by the time I got there the samba band had been replaced by an Oasis tribute act called Awaysis. They have a lead singer with round sunglasses, a moptop wig, and a long camel-coloured coat, who puts on a Paul Calf accent as he tries to get people to shout things. I only stuck it out for two halves and a Kenniford Farm roast-in-a-bun. I can hear them belting out Champagne Supernova as I type this back at home. Anyway, I'll go again tomorrow with my brother, and on Sunday I'll go again for the craft fair. So far I have tasted Forge Brewery's Litehouse, a delicious light golden beer, and Teignworthy's Old Moggie which is just a fraction darker and a bit more hoppy. This year one of the beers will be crowned the festival favourite, so I'm going to taste as many of them as I can manage and cast my vote.

Wow

We live on the surface of a massive rock that's spinning through space:

Good news!

I'm going to be an aunt again!  Or the same aunt but twice.  Hurray!  I wonder how small nephew will react to a sibling?

Small daft things

1. I had to renew my Exeter Cathedral card.  The postcode of the cathedral is EX1 1HS.  Someone must have done that deliberately.

2. Is it wrong to feel a little put off a solicitor because their phone number ends in 666, given that a solicitor is a type of lawyer?  Yes, it is, so I went with that solicitor anyway.

3. I'm not a fan of Bruno Mars.  I find it annoying how his songs get stuck in my head without my actually liking them.  But this alternative video for The Lazy Song is great, involving as it does Leonard Nimoy doing a sort of grumpier version of the Dude.

Dirty pony

Lady Gaga's new album is very excellent.  The best song is Scheiße (or ScheiBe as my ipod will have it):

She can't speak German, but she fakes it pretty convincingly.

If you'd prefer something not quite as hyperactive here's Bloody Mary:

I don't remember Jesus saying anything about dancing with your hands above your head, but I'm prepared to be corrected.

There are lots of other great songs, including Black Metal Lover, which has the lyric "Dirty pony, I can't wait to hose you down".

But she's tii-iiny

Here's female brown champion Jemima after shearing:

She's so little under all that fluff! And here's some video of some of the females in their pen after shearing. They're very keen to get back to their field, which is why they're making those agitated humming noises. Jemima's on the right.

Shearing 2011

Here are a few shearing photos. Suddenly the alpacas all look like supermodels, with lollipop heads on spindly bodies and long legs with clumpy feet.

The hotstepper

They're better off without their thick winter coats, but while some of them are calm about it all a few of them shriek like they're being murdered.

I was told there would be cake

One Before and several Afters in the holding pen

The shearer says that when he was a kid they were all given the day off school to go to the Devon County show.

Tra la-la la-la

I'm sorry, the last post celebrating Jemima's show triumphs should have been titled Brown Girl in the Ring. Here are some fabulous outfits to make up for it:

Alpaca update

Last August I blogged about the traumatic experience of a difficult alpaca birth that started when I was the only person around. Luckily first my dad and then a real vet arrived to do all the greasing up and little Jemima and her mother both survived. I put up video of some of her first steps. And now look at her!

Here she is at the Devon County Show last week, where she won her class, the biggest in the whole alpaca show, and then went on to win Champion Brown Female. This means she got to go into the main arena and parade round with all the other champions. Go Jemima!

I love these big agricultural shows. When I was a kid there was the Romsey show right next door to us on the Broadlands estate, and the New Forest and Hampshire shows, but now it's the Devon county, the Mid-Devon, and the Bath and West. Other people collect music festival security bracelet band things at this time of year, while I collect up ones from agricultural shows. My nephew came along on Friday afternoon. He loves tractors and was in absolute heaven. Here is a nice picture I took of the pony scurrying:

and a lovely little angora goat kid:

Today is alpaca shearing day. I'll try to get some photos but I don't want to get in the way.

Good stuff

1. I love how cutting-edge technology keeps getting used for quite trivial things. First there were those many odd gadgets in the Innovations catalogue which claimed to have been developed by NASA, as if the point of the moon missions had been to develop pens that worked upside down and really comfortable pillows. Total surveillance became possible, and the concept of Big Brother turned from a government controlling its people for sinister ends to a low-brow TV game show used to sell gossip magazines. Complex motion sensors and accelerometers were developed, and people use them to play tennis with someone in another city, or to pretend to be drinking beer from their iphone. It hadn't occurred to me that the Artificial Intelligence and the Turing test have gone the same way until I saw this excellent conversation between a bloke and a chatbot who wanted to get his credit card by pretending to be a young lady. This is really the Turing test in action, with real stakes. As a species, we're pretty slobbish. But I like that about us.

2. But this vision of books as places where you hang out to chat with random people about the book, rather than just reading it, and where the poor author never gets to finish the thing sounds pretty hellish to me. Interesting, but if it happens I don't think I'll be taking part. And a lot of readers are unsociable types like me. I think that digital books should instead develop things along the lines of the dictionary that's built into the kindle, things that help you read without getting in the way. The dictionary needs more words in it, since one only looks up obscure things anyway and there are so many old books for free on the Kindle, and it should have a lot more in the way of proper names, so that you can get a reminder of obscure references to mythical or historical figures. At the moment the endnotes of good editions of classics can be even harder to use than in the actual book, and that's just the sort of thing where an ebook reader ought to be able to give you instant info without breaking your reading. I have an edition (paperback) of Beowulf which has enough marginal vocabulary and notes about cruxes that it's possible to read Beowulf in the bath, and it makes so much difference to be able to read it as a poem rather than just translating it as a text. I think ebooks should go the route of unobtrusive help.

3. Talking of books and technology, I do rather like this new "book trailer" thing. At the time I missed the one Gary Shteyngart made for the release of Super Sad True Love Story in hardback, but it's great. He's made a sequel for the release of the paperback which is also quite funny, if not as good. Basically, if you've read any Shteyngart these will assure you that Super Sad True Love Story is the same sort of thing, and remind you why you like him. Well done Shteyngart.

Various internet things

1. Fans of Manchester United or some other football team are trying to get Paul Hardcastle's 19 to number one to celebrate their 19th title or something. But this is an angry song about the slaughter of young men in Vietnam and the terrible time the survivors had when trying to return to normal life. It's not really a victory anthem. I think this summarises my problem with sport.

2. Here is a Japanese robot baby. In this instance they have eschewed the uncanny valley but it's still startlingly spooky.

3. But this picture of Starbuck and Starbuck in Starbucks is great.

4. In Barcelona recently they set up a few Kinects and a 3D printer so that people could take home a little figurine of themselves in their choice of pose. The coverage went for the idea that this was some groundbreaking artistic endeavour instead of just great fun. That's something that annoys me about art -- it often seems ashamed to admit it's for fun.

5. These cat ears are controlled by the power of thought.

6. These people claim that in-born patterns in neurons are evidence for innate knowledge. This sort of thing really frustrates me. I'd need to know all about the possibilities of innate knowledge vs tabula rasa as explored by philosophy as well as about neuroscience and how brains are supposed to work in order to read this properly, with an informed and critical mind. And is "knowledge" the right word? My ignorance irritates me.

7. XKCD's zombie Marie Curie comic is fantastic. It should be put up in science labs in schools. Every time I go to the BL I get annoyed by the thing outside that says something like "Nothing in this world is to be feared, it is only to be understood -- Marie Curie", which may be a good sentiment, but seems to me to be seriously undercut by the fact that the thing she got her Nobel prizes for killed her in an unpleasant manner.

Parenting Lady Gaga

As she gets into the territory of the difficult second (if you don't count Monster and Remix), whether you still like Lady Gaga probably depends on whether you liked her wholeheartedly or reluctantly to start off with. I love mainstream pop, and I still think she's great. She has a new album out on Monday, and on the last two Mondays she has released tracks from it as teasers. I quite liked Edge of Glory, but Hair is excellent. It's about her teenage self saying to her parents "I want you to love me for who I am... I am my hair", and the refrain goes "This is my prayer, that I'll die living just as free as my hair". Spare a moment to sympathise with those two people trying to parent a teenage Lady Gaga.


Amazon.com's automated e-mails suggesting things that I might like to buy have just tried to tempt me with a digital watch, specifically a Casio F91-W. Well done amazon.com! I read boing boing, I'm anti-Guatanamo and a fan of the law of unintended consequences, so I did very briefly consider getting hold of one. Or, is it a trick? If I buy one will I end up on some register? It could backfire next time I try to get into Israel. Modern life is quite complicated.

Les neiges d'antan

When lecturing on codicology, or digitisation, or both, I have occasionally pointed out that the new Domesday survey done by schools in 1986, the nine-hundredth anniversary of the original, was unreadable within a decade or two, while the original manuscripts sit safely in the Public Record Office (OK, the National Archives), just as legible as ever. But they did a big project to get the 1986 data off the BBC microcomputer disks it was stored on, and now it's available online, searchable by place. There's a little BBC video about it here -- I don't know how to embed it. This one is less serious and has people from Tomorrow's World on it.

And it looks like the 1980s were actually as grey and brown as I remember them. This description of the village where I grew up says:

The main land cover is houses but some of it is small undeveloped grassy areas where children play after school.

That's exactly what it was like -- we all hung around playing in the bits of ground no one else had yet found a use for. Also, I remember this underpass! And this supermarket carpark too! (There was some reason why it was special to go to Carrefour, I forget what.) And Telegraph Wood Hill Fort, which now "only looks like an ordinary hill". We moved away when I was eleven so I feel very nostalgic about the place.

But I'm sorry to say that for the big 900-years since Domesday celebrations at my primary school we looked up the derivation of the name North Baddesley, found out that it meant North Bede's Lea, and decided this was insufficiently interesting. Instead we pretended it was called after someone known as Bad Desley, and we made him into a cowboy, and did an assembly about him, all in mime to the theme from Dynasty. I was one of the people who came on at the end and shot dead the few survivors from the raging gun fight which Bad Desley had provoked. I had a sheriff's badge.

I am fond of

1) My nephew! He's coming up for two and a half now, but he still thinks I'm funny, which is good. The other day I met up with him and his parents by the canal in Exeter. He saw me from quite a way away and ran up to me so I picked him up, and then he looked at me all seriously and said "Rat gone", with the air of one stating a regrettable fact. I'm pretty impressed he still remembers about the absence of rat. Today one of our neighbours' cats came out onto our decking, and my nephew went up and stroked her very gently. I was quite proud of him, all the more so when he saw how I put my hand out so the cat could decide for herself whether she wanted to rub her head on it, and copied me, luring the cat to him instead of approaching her. It's a good tactic with cats, especially if you're a toddler. So I am proud of having tutored him in the ways of pet righteousness.

2) The British Museum! It's like a refuge, with its huge light spaces and ancient stones. I went to see the Afghanistan exhibition, which is very good. Each of the sections is about a different important site, and is introduced by a placard that says something like "In 1961 the king was hunting with his courtiers when a local peasant presented him an intricately carved stone. He alerted French archaeologists, and they found the legendary lost city of Ay Khanum..." or whatnot. There's some fantastic stuff there from several different cultures.

3) Python! I am learning to program in Python, using some online resources I found. It makes me happy. It's quite a straightforward language.
print('Hello world!')

24-hour news

Here is a TV phone-interview with the man who inadvertently live-tweeted the Bin Laden raid. Slick CNN lady irritates tweeter by asking if he knew Osama bin Laden was living near his town, a question that is somewhere on the spectrum from very stupid to very insulting. Polite tweeterman later gets his revenge by explaining that he never watches TV and gets all his news from the Internet. Booyakasha! Your insensitive question asking days are numbered, smiley TV interview woman.

A German robot

Hurray for the Germans, who have made this sensible ball-catching and coffee-making robot.

This makes a nice contrast with Japanese robots, which seem mostly designed to freak people out. Here is a new thing where you can snog a device controlled by someone else's tongue, possibly the recorded tongue of a celebrity! The designers are hoping in the future to extend the simulation with real tongue moistness.

Calvin Harris

Here's the new Calvin Harris single. I really like it -- popjustice pointed out that the breakdown sounds like someone actually having a breakdown. But why is Calvin Harris, who presumably has access to the original, uploading to YouTube a rough rip from Annie Mac's radio show? Is it because he's really really cool?

Some things on the web

I've been avoiding the coverage of the Bin Laden thing on the whole, but this Boing Boing story about how many American teenagers have no idea who Bin Laden was is quite compelling. I suppose you're lucky with teenagers if they notice someone who's walking on the same pavement as them, let alone someone who's declared war on their country.

You can vote here for your favourite American Civil War facial hair. I rather like how John Haskell King has incorporated his hair into the overall design, and George Crook has gone for an interesting two-triangle beard. And Burnside's are the original sideburns, supposedly.

This cartoon shows the recipe for an instant bestseller, in this case "Dark Angel Architect Boyfriend".

I would quite want this Lady Gaga/Bronzino mashup if Beyonce didn't look so rough.

Here is some great tidying up music:

April: some things I read in it

March and April have both been dominated by Lent reading, which is slow, though I actually didn't manage to get through as much of Augustine on the Psalms as I had hoped. Also some of what I read this month was a bit meh. But books I really enjoyed in April include:

Jo Walton's Small Change trilogy: Farthing, Ha'penny, and Half A Crown.
If you think of the 1930s country house set two things come to mind: golden age murder mysteries; and an unfortunate fondness for fascism. Walton combines the two in Farthing, which is set in an alternate England where one such group managed to bypass Churchill in 1941 and agree a "peace with honour" with Hitler. Ever since they have been riding on a wave of popularity with the people, who are understandably quite glad to be done with the bombing and fighting. The novel takes place eight years later at Farthing, the country house where this particular set meets, over the course of a long weekend when a prominent politician is found stabbed in his dressing room. The narration alternates between Carmichael, a police inspector who struggles to solve the case while the aristocrats close ranks, and the daughter of the house, who has disgraced herself in their eyes by marrying a Jew. It's very well done, scarily believable. The next two books continue the story, though with different ingenues each time. The ongoing compromises made by Carmichael, a good man in a hard position, are particularly compelling. I think Jo Walton is great.

Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Classy.

Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, The Apple
I reread The Crimson Petal on watching the brilliant BBC adaptation. This is a really extremely good book, and currently available on Kindle for a ridiculously low price. I hadn't read the Apple before. It's also very good, but more like a series of footnotes to the longer novel, to help you cope with the novel's famously abrupt ending.

Garbage in garbage out

All small children are strange, and I wasn't less strange than most. When I was about eight I went through a phase of worrying that, if God woke me up in the night and asked me what I most wanted, like he did with Solomon, I would be too confused to say "wisdom" and would instead say "chocolate... no, no, wisdom!" but it would be too late and God would give me loads of chocolate but very little respect.

I told a friend about this childhood yearning for wisdom one evening as we sat at Combination on a Sunday night, after High Table in college. I can't remember what in the conversation led up to this, but I assume that the wines served with dinner might have had something to do with it. "Well," he said, "here you are." And gestured round at our surroundings. I laughed, and then had to stop myself quickly when I realised that he did actually mean it. We were sat around the table which doubles for use in governing body meetings, lit only by a couple of candelabra; not one but two port decanters were circulating to the left and the atmosphere was pretty convivial. High Table attracts a certain type of College Fellow, especially on Sunday nights after Evensong -- not religious, often very anti-religious, but traditional. I was usually the only woman there, unless the president or one of the guests had brought in a wife, and on the whole I was not much more than half the average age. At the time the college was engaged in a horrible and incomprensible dispute triggered by a newcomer taking up a senior position. One of the men around that table had recently told me that the incomer's (unspecified) behaviour could only be explained if he was truly evil; another was using the split to try to settle a long-standing score with an old rival, startlingly ineptly; the fellow who had started the whole thing with a formal complaint was someone whom I would still on the whole describe as sensible. It was very nasty at the time, and in retrospect I see it as a learning experience about human nature, like watching Big Brother. But that's why I laughed when my friend suggested that I had, by winning a place in that company, visibly achieved wisdom.

Nonetheless there was certainly a lot of intelligence in that room. (Especially if you define intelligence as a propensity to a certain sort of stupidity.) It would be fascinating to know how many of those middle-aged men would have agreed with my friend in equating the college's fellowship with wisdom, and how many would have found the concept intrinsically risible like I did. I've been reading up on artificial intelligence a bit recently, and what has startled me about it is the willingness of physicists to put forwards definitive theoretical pronouncements about the nature of human intelligence. I think I may now need to read up on ideas of what "intelligence" is, as a way of strengthening my mind against blind acceptance of their assumptions. But it's interesting, and a bit of a relief, that no one seems to be talking about artificial wisdom. What would it take to build a computer that could say comforting things to the bereaved? Could it be taught to do that, or would it have to learn, and would it first have to be itself capable of suffering?

Some things from the internet

Look, if you've robbed a liquor store and shot the cashier and the police are stumped, you're a fool to yourself if you then get a detailed picture of the crime scene tattoo'd on your chest.

The difference between city life and country life.

Look at the young elk!

This was filmed by David Neils, and he has more on his website, http://www.offthepavement.org.

Aunt-presenting dilemmas solved!

Have you got an excellent aunt in your life? I mean one of those sensible, intelligent, practical aunts, more of a Dahlia than an Agatha? Perhaps said aunt is coming up for a birthday, or you'd like to express your appreciation of her qualities in some tangible, easily postable form? Perhaps recovery from a minor operation is forcing her to slow down her usual activities and convalescence is hanging heavy on her hands? Luckily for you the solution is only a few clicks away! My aunt-targetted book Saint Margaret's Gospel-book is currently on sale at ten pounds instead of twenty-five, which was already a bargain considering the combination of hand-crafted text and lots of extremely excellent pictures.

'a gem of a book - it sparkles with interest' -- Henrietta Leyser, serious historian whom I don't even know
'if you liked Harry Potter you'll like this' -- a boy I used to babysit

Written by an aunt for aunts -- actually I wasn't an aunt at the time, but I did write it with my Aunt Cynthia in mind -- it's the solution to all your aunt-presenting needs. [Pdf of sale catalogue here.]

Also works on great-aunts, mothers (I dedicated it to mine), god-parents, friends of the family, and anyone who's interested in eleventh-century Scotland, Anglo-Saxon England, medieval manuscripts, royalty, saints, libraries, books, or women. Caution: has not been tested on uncles.

An affordable trebuchet

I do love Kickstarter. If you haven't come across it yet, it's basically a way for people who have a cool idea to ask for people to invest in it. They make a video explaining what they're proposing to do, and give a list of options for investing, ranging from cheap to expensive. (The expensive one very often includes a meal out "if you're in the Bay area".) Usually your pledge equates to preordering a various amount of their proposed product. There's a funding target and a deadline. If there have been enough pledges by the deadline to meet the funding target then the project goes into production, and the people pay their money and get their reward. If the target isn't met then no one pays any money and that's that. I think the new version of Hucklebury Finn where they replace every instance of the n-word with "robot" was a Kickstarter thing, and the Robocop statue for Detroit. People also raise funding for short films and such, especially documentaries.

I've never actually invested in any of their projects yet but I'm very tempted by this desk-top trebuchet. It needs no glue or nails to put together. They're also going to subsidise ones for schools -- they're thinking of science classes but I think history classes might like them too. If my nephew were only a few years older I would definitely get one for him.

Another good project is this one for things which keep your coffee hot for longer. And this one for 360 degree video for the iphone 4 is pretty cool.

Everybody in the house of love

I really like this:

The real thing is not going to top it.

Eurovision

I might even watch Eurovision this year, which makes me suspect that people who usually watch it won't like it so much. The UK has finally decided to make some sort of effort by getting our song sung by an actual pop group, though admittedly one that split up six years ago. Here's Sweden's entry, which is great. It's not actually by Bodies Without Organs (BWO) but it sounds quite like them, which is a good thing. (I got it off of popjustice, as ever.)

I decided to give up irony in 1994, because I noticed that even the Pet Shop Boys had moved on in favour of fun. They felt like taking all their clothes off and dancing to the Rite of Spring:

I told a friend of mine who I didn't know very well back then that I had given up irony, and he thought I was being sarcastic. If I ever write the sort of deathbed novel/memoir where you look back on the defining points of your life (like Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, which is brilliant) then that moment will definitely be included. Every now and then something happens to remind you that it's actually impossible to communicate properly with any other human being. But it matters less than you'd think, because we bridge the gap with kindness and goodwill.

A quick warning re: scam

Some months ago my mother was scammed over the phone. She sort-of knew she'd been scammed immediately, and was immediately repentant, and we stopped her credit card and sorted it all out. It upset me quite a lot at the time for two reasons: 1) I'm not ready for my parents to need protection from scammers other than their own common sense; 2) I wasn't quite sure at first what the scammers were up to. I just had a phonecall from the same people, who have phoned back quite a lot since then, and amused myself by keeping them on the phone for as long as possible, as an outlet for my annoyed feelings. I thought I'd post about this quickly just in case anyone who reads this blog finds themselves, like me, in the position of default IT support for their parents, and would like to warn them to be cautious.

The caller says that they're from "Windows Service Department" or something similar. They do their best to make you think that they're from Microsoft and are official Windows people without actually stating it. They say they have a report indicating that there are problems with your computer, and that it may be running slowly. (This is as far as they got today because I asked them why they were spying on my computer and they hung up.) From what happened with my mother, it seems that when you express concern they tell you to go to your computer, and talk you through running a diagnostic on it. This is where I was really worried at first because my mother couldn't describe to me quite what had happened, but it seems that what they tell you to do is a genuine inbuilt Windows diagnostic which lists all the issues your computer has had. They're relying on the almost certainty that your computer has at some point returned an error message, or even crashed. You tell them that there are error reports, and they persuade you to pay them money for software which is supposed to make it all OK.

I would never have expected my mother to fall for this. I would have expected her to stop at the point where they asked for money. When she told me about it I was really concerned that they might have already got spyware on her computer somehow before they called, but in fact it's just an aggressive selling technique, and they count on most of the people they call having a Windows computer. I uninstalled what they had got her to put on, and did some really long and thorough virus checks, so I hope her computer's OK now. At least she didn't give them remote access.

Links to other people being scammed:
http://www.digitaltoast.co.uk/supportonclick-systemrecure-scam
http://money-watch.co.uk/7118/beware-of-the-windows-phone-scam
http://money-watch.co.uk/8183/windows-support-scam-worsens
If you read the comments to the middle article you'll see that my mother is far from being alone in being caught out. Worse than the sixty quid (which she did get back by telling the credit card people) was that she felt really stupid and worried about whether she's going doolally. Cue me spending lots of time googling the symptons of early onset dementia and worrying about her. It was all very unpleasant.

On the other hand if you do get a phonecall from them, here is an opportunity to be really rude to someone without feeling even a glimmer of guilt afterwards. So it's not all bad. I actually quite like it when they call now.

Wow I made it work

I mentioned in the last post a problem I had using a Javascript button to import a book into LibraryThing from its amazon.co.uk page. I have fixed it! Hurray for me! I don't know any Javascript, I just hacked it around a bit and compared the output with the input until it did the right thing. The button which you get from this LibraryThing page has this javascript:

javascript:var%20rx%20=%20/amazon\.(.*?)\/.*?\/(.{10})\//;%20var%20rs%20=%20new%20Array();%20var%20rs%20=%20document.URL.match(rx);%20if(rs==null)%20{%20alert('Use%20this%20on%20an%20Amazon%20book%20page.');%20}%20else%20{%20pt%20=%20prompt('Tags?%20(or%20leave%20blank)');%20location.href='http://www.librarything.com/addbooks.php?bm=1&isbn='+rs[2]+'&vs='+rs[1]+'&pt='+encodeURI(pt);%20}

I saw that there is a quick URL-based import using ISBN described on this LibraryThing page, so I altered it to this:

javascript:var%20rx%20=%20/amazon\.(.*?)\/.*?\/(.{10})\//;%20var%20rs%20=%20new%20Array();%20var%20rs%20=%20document.URL.match(rx);%20if(rs==null)%20{%20alert('Use%20this%20on%20an%20Amazon%20book%20page.');%20}%20else%20{%20pt%20=%20prompt('Tags?%20(or%20leave%20blank)');%20location.href='http://www.librarything.com/addbook/'+rs[2]}

and it now works for me. I feel so good about this it's ridiculous.

So if you use LibraryThing and drag this link: Add to LibraryThing to your bookmark toolbar then you should now be able to use the bookmarklet. Wow I am so smug right now.

LibraryThing thoughts so far

Anna asked me how I find using LibraryThing, and I found my answer getting rather too long for a comment, so here it is as a separate blog post.

Basically I'm really enjoying using LibraryThing, and I love keeping track of what I've been reading, with the option of writing brief reviews to help me remember it later. Also it has a lot of side benefits I wasn't expecting, like being able to pull up a list of all an author's books very quickly. But this is with a big proviso, that I'm only using it for leisure books, not for academic ones.

When it comes to cataloguing, if you're dealing like I am with predominantly leisure books then you can get hold of a cheap barcode scanner and use that to input ISBNs. That's quite a quick way to proceed. Most of my novels and such have barcodes, and ones that have ISBNs but no barcodes are still pretty quick to input. It's the sort of thing you can do while listening to the radio or watching TV. LibraryThing sells the CueCat scanner very cheaply, just fifteen dollars even including UK postage. This is a scanner which was made in huge numbers and given out free some time ago by record stores and magazines, and although it's not made any more and the systems it was made for collapsed, there are vast numbers floating around for which people are finding other uses. It works with LibraryThing straight off, or you can easily install software to make it work with anything that can cope with text input. (I installed some software called CatNip to make it give me plain input and then used it to sell CDs on the MusicMagpie website.) Or apparently you can get your webcam or phone to work as a barcode scanner, but that's much fiddlier than you'd think, because the image has to be just right. Here's someone talking about doing this with an iPhone.

I have tried out the exporting feature but only out of curiosity, I haven't really done things with it. It doesn't have a lot of flexibility -- you choose between comma- and tab- separated and that's that -- but I think it should be adequate for most purposes. I can see the data going into Endnote without much fiddling, for example, and I have a lot of experience of fiddling with data to get it to go into Endnote. (Ever since I finished my PhD I have been employed to fiddle with the machine-readability of bibliographic data, which is such a depressing thought.) I have imported successfully, from a database I made using Collectorz.com book cataloguing software some years ago. I had a barcode scanner then too but it was more expensive than the CueCat and it broke. The collectorz.com software was good; I suppose it's really LibraryThing's widgets that sold it to me, and it is interesting to see which of your books are rare. You can theoretically have private books, or make your whole library private, neither of which routes I have as yet taken, though I did feel a terrible pang when I started cataloguing the books in my parents' library which I have read and some of the first were by Jeffrey Archer.

LibraryThing's big competitor is GoodReads, and I read up on them both before choosing. LibraryThing is supposedly aimed more at librarians while GoodReads is more about social-networking, which is what decided me. Also lots of book bloggers I read, like Stuck in a Book, use LibraryThing.

I think there are basically two issues with LibraryThing. One is that it's a cheap system, and things like the Help literature are a bit ad hoc. It's basically someone's pet project continued. When dealing with commercial software you often think "I ought to be able to do this in this way" while with this sort of software you just have to adapt yourself to the way in which things have been set up to be done. There's a bookmarklet which is supposed to let you add books directly from their amazon page but I can't get it to work (I think because I'm going for .co.uk not .com). It's not a problem, instead I just import books using the way they expect you to do it. And because there's an API maybe someone with actual programming knowledge will sort this out at some point -- like with Firefox, it's open for knowledgeable users to improve it themselves with browser addons and such and then share their work with others. There are some GreaseMonkey scripts, for example. I would love to be the sort of person who could write scripts for GreaseMonkey.

The second and bigger issue is to do with multiple authors. It lets you put in one author, and then add a further author or translator or editor or whatever as part of the additional information a long way down the book-description page. This is fine as a way of dealing with a collection of novels. Of course it won't do at all for my academic books, many of which have two or more authors who need to share equal billing. So I don't know if I'll ever move my academic books onto it. I need a proper catalogue of them, but I expect I'll do it in Endnote, where it would only involve adding keywords to existing entries.

There is no entirely adequate bibliographical software out there. Endnote is the nearest I can get, with advantages like widespread support and very flexible exports. I think maybe that if we could get at just why there is no OK bibliographic software when it seems like a reasonably straightforward thing to do, then we might at the same time solve the problem of what is wrong with academia.

I do like books

Book culture is quite interesting. In the US you can now get a cheaper Kindle if you don't mind having special offer adverts on the home page and screensavers. Since you can't customise the home page and screensavers anyway, so it's not like you can make them all nice like you want them, I don't think I'd mind having adverts for Visa instead. The crucial thing is that your reading is not interrupted.

I would guess that I now read about a third of my books on the kindle. I spend too much money on books, especially for someone with very little income, but not much of that spending goes to authors or publishers. A lot of what I read is old material, things I've seen recommended on blogs or want to read because I'm interested in their subject matter, and I can usually get hold of these for something between three and five pounds secondhand including postage. If there is a kindle edition available for a similar price I prefer that; but basically, there isn't. I'm hoping that publishers will catch up a bit with the idea of availability of the backlist, because I'd much rather that a proportion of the money I pay for a book goes to the publisher and author rather than a secondhand book seller. I'm currently reading Katie Whitaker's biography of Margaret Cavendish, Mad Madge, and enjoying it very much. I spent three pounds ninety-seven pence on it, including postage. If there were an ebook version available then Vintage, who presumably took the initial risk of paying an advance for the book and publishing it, and Whitaker, who actually wrote the thing, could continue to get a little trickle of income from its sale long after the actual physical copies have gone off to be remaindered or whatever. The book is out of print, but it was actually only published in 2004, which doesn't seem so very long ago to me.

Sedgemoor

I went to help my parents set up at an alpaca show about an hour away up the M5. On the way back, as we drove over the Sedgemoor Drain, my father sighed miserably. My mother, who was driving, patted his knee, and asked what the matter was. She rarely asks that sort of thing, but then he had sounded quite depressed. "I was thinking what a shame it was that Monmouth didn't press on to London in 1685", he replied. My dad's a bit of a loony, but I do like that he's unexpected.

I don't think he's so much pro-Monmouth, by the way, as anti-Judge Jefferys.

QED nearly

Chickens, when they run, are funny. I've been trying to prove this recently using the video function on my cheap digital camera. Here's the best I've done so far, with the kind help of my mother, whom they love, or at least yearn to be near. But for the full effect you need to have them running towards you madly, with a glint in their eye that says "bacon rind?"

The Masters

One of the few things likely to make me feel proud of having been to Trinity is their Masters. Amartya Sen, who is just obviously great, was Master for most of the time while I was there. Now it's Martin Rees, who has just won some prize awarded to scientists by Christians and therefore controversial blah blah blah. Here is his comment on the "Hawking says there's no God" story that ran a while ago:

I know Stephen Hawking well enough to know that he has read little philosophy and less theology, so I don't think his views should be taken with any special weight.

I just love the idea of "little philosophy and less theology" as the modern equivalent of Shakespeare's small Latin and less Greek. And I love it when people talk like it's obvious that there's meaning in the humanities. Go Martin Rees!

I love you, Devon

Mystery object brings town to standstill. The people of Bridgwater aren't sure if it was a pig's head, a turtle, or just a stone. When the reporter returned to the scene the next day it had gone.

The world into which I was born

This clip was posted on boing boing but I only watched it because it's from the BBC news on the day I was born. It makes me feel illogically nostalgic.

We've had a similar slightly crazy posh old lady staying with us this weekend, an old friend of my grandparents from Kensington. When my nephew dropped his toy phone and the batteries fell out, she picked it up for him saying in cut-glass tones "Oh, it's absolutely maddening, I quite agree", and my brother and sister-in-law got the giggles.

Winter is coming

HBO have released twelve Sean-Bean-heavy minutes of their new adaptation of A Game of Thrones, the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, which I read in February. I really want to see this. Watch out for the white-haired man with the impressive facial hair arrangement. Also, if you see the whole thing at some point watch out for no character being safe from a sudden violent death, even the main characters and the ones you really like.

Things I have read in March

Because it's Lent I am currently reading Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos, in a very good English translation by a hermit called Maria Boulding. It's not a quick read -- many of the Psalms have more than one commentary, and I've only just got onto the third volume, Psalms 51-72, even though I started the work last Lent. I'm not rushing through it because I'm enjoying it. It includes expected things and also unexpected things that make me stop and think, and jolt me out of an easy reading -- if it were an exam script I would give it a first. I love the feeling you get sometimes when you're reading something centuries old, either in the original or in a very fluent translation, that the author and the original audience are both totally alien and remarkably recognisable. The sermons were preached in North Africa, often in Carthage, to a people who were occasionally tempted away to the chariot races instead. I have never skived off church to go to see my favourite chariot racer. But in other ways it's strikingly germane. If I muster the energy I'll blog about the specifics of this at some point.

Lent means I have read less in March than in February and January, which is a good thing. I read the first two of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books with enjoyment, and marvelled at the way the series completely crashes and burns in book three. I enjoyed Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind, but had trouble quite understanding at whom it was aimed. Most of what she was saying seemed utterly self-evident to me, and a lot of my enjoyment came from a sense of relief that someone is actually saying it. But with her formidable mind and her extremely wide reading comes a tendency to rather opaque language which I'm not convinced is completely necessary. I suppose it's a dichotomy in the sources she criticises: some of them are aggressively aimed at everyperson, while others are couched in the polysyllabic sociolect of post-Theory academia. But her most telling points are against the former, but written in the style of the latter, which I'm not sure is going to do anyone much good. [Edit: in the middle of the night I suddenly remembered that this book was first given as lectures to just such an audience. Which accounts for the tone.]

I read two books with thoroughly depressing premises, Emma Donaghue's Room and Kazuo Ishuguro's Never Let Me Go. The first one transcends the horribleness by being through the eyes of a small child who loves his mother, while the second was just bloody depressing, though technically good, I suppose.

And I read Jenny Uglow's book about the first ten years of Charles II's reign. Bloody Charles II. Here's my review off LibraryThing:
This was quite good. I'm not totally convinced by it, though. The idea of Charles as a gambling king is a little forced, because surely no statesman has any choice other than to take the occasional risk. Also this only covers the first ten years of his twenty-five-year reign. It's hard not to suspect that this has something to do with Pepys' abandonment of his diary in 1669, though Uglow implies that it's because of Charles' last meeting with Minette in 1670, and his successful completion of his secret treaty with Louis XIV (*spits*). The way that this book splits things up into categories means it doesn't have a strong narrative, although this is more a problem in the first than the second half. And I have read a lot of other books covering the same ground. This book just didn't seem that engaged with the period, and although disengagement is a deliberate way of writing history, it's not very human. She's clearly on Charles's side, but failed to make me understand why. The King Charles who spent tens of thousands on his mistresses and laughed when his foully-behaved gallants tricked lower-class women into fake marriages and then abandoned them was the same Charles whose navy didn't pay its sailors, and who was offended when he found that one of his servants had stopped laying out paper for council meetings because he had not once been paid and could not afford to keep running up personal debts to provide the king with paper. Charles could not stand being dependent on the English parliament for his money to such an extent that he preferred to be dependent on Louis XIV for his money, making a secret treaty with the most dangerous despot of the time, and agreeing to convert to Catholicism for two hundred thousand pounds cash. We should have stuck with the kingless commonwealth, says I. Roll on the Glorious Revolution!
But I liked the Duchess of Newcastle's poem inspired by Lucretius on atoms:

For millions of these atoms may be in
The head of one small, little, single pin.
And if this small, then ladies well may wear
A world of worlds as pendents in each ear.

Also I didn't know that Charles' widow, Catherine of Braganza, went back to Portugal and was regent for her brother for a while.