The Other Book of Ely

A love poem in 15 words or less:

Not for nothing did she sing beneath the stars
But for love.


However, this is only two lines of a verse not known in Elven lore:

( Not for nothing )

One more video. The attached is only a sample, but Bella Gaia looks awesome. It's just the latest in a long line of this sort of thing - see The Space Movie,l or various bits of the Orb - and its rather longer on atmospherics than hard data, but still it's incredibly beautiful:



Courtesy of info_sthetics

Possibly the oldest LOLcat in the world

Courtesy of languagelog

The limitations of the print media in this age of instant communication have been cruielly shown up by this month's Q magazine. Its major feature on Michael Jackson, commenting on his upcoming 50-show residency at the O2, and projected new album, hit news-stands on Saturday morning, a little over 24 hours after his death. The copy therefore reads a little oddly, to say the least.

The button on the cover promising "CSI ROCK: Dead Musos Exhumed" is also very unfortunate in the circumstances.

Was listening to some of "Bad" on the way home. The title track still sounds unutterably camp, but The Way You make Me feel is a circuit-cable plugging me back into being 12 again.

"You don't look well", he pronounced
"Indigestion" I replied
"From what?"
"Reality"
"Join the queue"

[Carlos Ruiz Zafon - "The Angel's Game"]

Yes, it's pulp. Yes, no guignol was ever grander. Yes, the plate-spinning of multiple plot-lines and characters comes unstuck from time to time.

But my words, it's good to return to the Cemtery of Forgotten Books.

As the WHO prepares to emerge from its hole and tell us it sees a shadow, I was moved to go looking for something germane, and to my delight found it is still there.

The Other Preparing For Emergencies Website

I feel a little like Philip Larkin in "Homage to a Government" this morning - the country looks the same, the people on the train have the same faces, but we are now living in a country which, for the first time, has sent anti-immigration extremists among those who will represent us in Europe. It looks the same, but it isn't the same country.

Of course, in real terms this doesn't make much difference - we tell ourselves that the European parliament doesn't matter anyway, and it's not as if a majority of the UK delegation is BNP or anything (whatever you may think of the Tories, and many of you will think them pretty evil, I know, they are not the BNP).

But, as so often, it is the symbolism which sticks, and cuts at the heart.

[I live in fear of someone saying "So what's so wrong with the BNP?", half in jest, and half seriously saying that if mainstream politics has failed, what's wrong wityh shaking it up, and they won't have any power anyway. It;s not that people who ask this are racists, or stupid - it's just that many suffer the British disease of believing that they can't really change anything, and that They will decide what happens anyway. In such a case, politics becomes a story only, and the BNP just another character.
My fear is because it would be so easy to scream "because they're a bunch of racist bastards", but what is needed is a measured argument which shows not only why the BNP are the wrong party (that's realtively easy, though it would need more figures than I have on me), but also why it matters, and that latter is the hard bit]

It feels a hard day to be British.