All hail the Hypno-ferry

Spent very nice weekend in Dorset, land of my fathers. And of my Granny. Discovered that the chain ferry in Poole is sporting a new banner it never used to have... and which I find a little sinister.



Forthcoming banners in the chain ferry's insidious propaganda campaign:

OBEY CHAIN FERRY WITHOUT QUESTION
CHAIN FERRY CAN SEE INTO YOUR BRAIN
TREMBLE BEFORE MIGHT OF CHAIN FERRY
BRING CHAIN FERRY HUMAN SACRIFICE
IN NAME OF CHAIN FERRY... NUKE BOURNEMOUTH

Together to the end

An online dictionary I use has a quote of the day on its front page. Today's is:

'Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.'
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

I like to imagine them lying in adjacent hospital beds, angrily chanting this in unison.

...Not to mention numbers 1 to 5.

Talking of adverts on the tube, this is quite a striking one:


Now, I'm no advertising executive, thank the Lord, but I'm quite tempted to write in to the University of Dundee, suggesting they run an advert to be placed next to this one, reading. 'Fact. You're quite obviously not.'

Lynne Truss has a lot to answer for. For which to answer, I mean.

In one of the lifts at Chalk Farm tube station, a scholarly debate is raging. Someone has amended one of those Microsoft adverts with the dinosaur headed office workers- the one featured a triceratops trying to get on with his photocopying, with the slogan 'This data is multiplying like rabbits.' The offended grammarian has crossed out 'This' and 'is', and replaced them with 'These' and 'are'. Fine. But, gloriously, someone else has crossed out the correction, replaced the original words, and added 'Stet. Data is an uncountable noun'. I just love the 'stet'. What, in case someone tries to print the lift?

(Of course, if it is an uncountable noun, you've got to worry about whether it can be compared to rabbits, plural. Perhaps the slogan should more properly be: 'This data is multiplying like the rabbit'. Or, for complete clarity: 'This data is multiplying at the speed colloquially associated with the species Oryctolagus Cuniculus.' But let's give the guy a break, shall we? After all, he has a lot of photocopying to do. And he has the head of a triceratops.)

Time and motion study

Typing away at something just now, I decided to change the word ‘coincidentally’ to ‘accidentally’. Obviously, there was no point in deleting the 'ally' at the end - that's four keystrokes of my valuable time. So, I put my cursor in front of the a, and prepared to hit backspace. Then I noticed the words had more in common than I thought. There was a 'dent' I had no need to delete and retype... and come to that, a 'ci' in front of that! So, I diligently moved my cursor back through the letters till it was between 'coin' and ‘cidentally’. Then I started deleting. But when I got to the last letter, I noticed it was a c, and I needed a double c for 'accidentally'. So I hopped over it, and placed an ‘a’ before it. Voila.

All this was done without the least hint of self-awareness, as just the logical thing to do. My God, but for someone who is prepared to drop everything for half an hour to stick paper eyes on a tulip, I seem very careful not to waste vital milliseconds typing letters twice…

Return of the Killer Tulips

Interesting. I've had more emails in response to my evil tulip post than to all the other posts on this blog put together. Thanks, no doubt, to the link from the blog of well known author, frog collector and bon viveur Joe Craig. Thanks, Joe! Anyway, by popular demand, here are a few more shots of the little critters. Click to see the full size version. (Oh, and... I promise I wouldn't be pompous enough to mention this unless people had asked; but: yes, you're welcome to use these images yourself, so long as you say where you got 'em from. Although links are nice. Copyright remains with me. )