Round up the usual suspects.

List of my possessions currently not working or working imperfectly:

My printer
My camera
My mp3 player
My nose

List of people I suspect of being to blame for the above:

Me.
The Samsung Corporation of Korea.
No prime suspect as yet.
The ginger haired woman who sat opposite me on a crowded tube and coughed continuously for twenty minutes, dammit.

Book I'm pretending to read today: 'Vibrational-rotational excitations in nonlinear molecular systems.'

Reviews not found on the back:

‘Vibrational, rotational… sensational!’ The Daily Express.

‘Molecular systems have never been so excitating!’ The Mirror

‘A rip-roaring, block-busting, page-turning romp through the world of multi-quantra intra-molecular transitions in the vicinity of bifurcation points. Don’t read it on public transport – you’ll laugh like a loony!’ The Sunday Times

‘Disappointing’ The New Scientist

Actual first sentence:

“If there would be no God – then what a staff-captain am I?” said one of the characters in a novel by Dostoevskii. In a similar way we can exclaim: “If there would be no nonlinearity – then what physics would that be?”

Difficult to pick my favourite word there: obviously ‘staff-captain’ is very tempting, but I’m going to have to go for ‘exclaim’.

Still, they also make 'The Thick Of It'.

In the receptions of one of the BBC's buildings, there is a muted television tuned to BBC1, with the subtitles turned on. This means that every time you pass, you get a little captioned snapshot of what the largest public sector broadcaster in the world is all about. When I passed it the other day, this is what was on the screen.

Two men looking at a house.
Caption: 'If this house was a celebrity, what celebrity do you think it would be?'

I sneak cooks.

On the back of a cubicle door in the gents at the British Library, someone, possibly under the impression that a survey is being taken, has written ‘I suck cocks’. And underneath, someone else has written ‘I cock snooks’. Excellent.

VERY slow, ideally. You might even like to consider stopping.

Cuh. Windy out, isn't it? Luckily, the police force is there to serve and protect us whatever the weather. For instance, a large tree has been blown down in Borehamwood, but the local bobbies have lost no time in springing into action with a prudent warning:

There. That should do it. Who's for a doughnut?

I say Potato, you have no comment to make at this time.

So, what's going on then? Is it:

A) You've all sent me to Coventry as punishment for posting a cutesy picture of the dog?
B) Changing from Blogger to Google Blogger at the start of the year has somehow messed up the 'comment' funtion?
C) You're all hiding until February, when you're going to jump out and shout 'Boo!' at me?

I do realise, of course, that if it is any of these, you won't be able to tell me so. Therefore:

If A), leave a stern and disgusted silence.
If B), leave an apologetic but helpless silence.
If C), leave a hushed but giggly silence.

Go.

I looked again, and found it was / A hippopotamus.

I just looked out of my window to see what I thought was an elderly gentleman in a dark business suit and overcoat consulting a pocket watch attached by a chain to his waistcoat. Except of course it wasn’t, because I am not Dickens. He was quite a young man, and it was an mp3 player attached by its headphones to his inside jacket pocket. But the attitude he struck as he stood there looking at it would have been entirely familiar to his great-grandfather.

But try the one in Jail Road, Lahore.

Book I’m pretending to read at the British Library today:

‘A List of Post Offices In Pakistan (corrected up to 31-5-74)’

So, if you happen to be reading this in Dhari Sayyadan, Jhelum, in 1974, (possibly after a ‘Life on Mars’ style accident), and are hoping to send a telegram, I can exclusively advise you not to get your hopes up. Telegrams are not accepted. Sorry about that.

How can they be so sure?

Seen outside a shop advertising diet supplements:

'Can you pinch an inch? We can pinch up to 12 inches, or more!'

So, either less than twelve, or more than twelve, or twelve. And that's a promise!

Similarly (so similarly as not to deserve its own post) in a little independent video and DVD shop near me:

Sale! All films for £1.99 or less*!

*Excludes some dvds.

May 2007 be full of the things you like, with hardly any of the things you dislike.

(One or two small ones, obviously. Otherwise you'll have nothing to feel hard-done-by about, and where's the fun in that?)

Anyway, happy new year! I've celebrated it by redesigning the appearance of my blog to more exactly resemble a leisure centre swimming pool, and by joining myspace. Because the one thing I really need in my life this year is another way to procrastinate. Oh yes.

www.myspace.com/johnfinnemore