Aurlog

Merry Christmas

As I explained last year I don't work Fridays, and college is closed until a.d. iv non. ian. mmvii. So, merry Christmas and a happy New Year! To keep you going, I offer a choice of Christmas cracker joke:

  1. A group of chess contestants in a hotel reception are bragging about how good they are. The manager asks them to leave as he doesn't want "Chess nuts boasting in an open foyer"
    Source: Gordon, Birmingham, a comment to Your favourite Christmas cracker jokes, Telegraph.co.uk
  2. What do you do if a kitten spits at you?
    Turn the grill down
    Source: Cristmas Crackers by Rob Manuel. Warning: this is one of the pleasanter ones.

A.D. XII KAL. IAN. MMVI

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Two of everything in Sandy

Following my post earlier this year pointing out that there are two Lloyds chemists a few doors down from eachother, two Forbuoys newsagents across the market square from eachother, and two Budgens, stevepsandy was good enough to write a couple of lengthy comments to explain these points. As the comments feed for this website is still in progress for Aurlog, I reproduce his comments below. Many thanks!:

The issue of two chemists newsagents and Budgens is quite simple:

1. The big 'Fourboys' in the Market Square, used to be a private newsagents for many years, then got taken over by the TM Group t/a Fourboys. The little Forbouys down on the parade opposite used to belong to Jack Berry. When he retired and sold up, Fourboys took it over. These two units now trade under the Martin McColl banner, which is the lates incarnation of the TM Group (HO Brentwood Essex).

2. In a not disimilar fashion the two chemsts almost side by side were also competing. The big one, next to the chippy, was for many years a launderette and when first opened as a chemists, was called 'Cooks'. The small chemist, next to the alleyway leading to the Health Centre, used to be owned by a small independent, who had several pharmacies in the region (can,t recall their name off-hand but it was someone's name, first & surname - female). The small chemist was eventually sold off to what is now Lloyds and the'Cooks' chemist was already (it's believed) another trading name of the Lloyds group. It's not clear why both chemists now trade under the Lloyds banner but the two offer similar but differing services. The little Lloyds tends to be the more traditional type of chemist, selling prescription and non-presciption drugs OTC items & preparations, health related testing kits, general bathroom and washroom products and so on. The big Lloyds, whilst selling much of what the little one does, because of its' larger floor and shelf space, sell a wide range of haircare accessories, beauty aids, giftware and since recent times, invalid buggies! So, in short, the two offer quite a complementary service.

3. Budgens (now franchised in both sites), part of Musgrove Budgen Londis Group (MBL), trades both in the town centre and on the new Fallowfield development in the north of the town. The Budgens franchise in Fallowfield has come after a long battle with the developers, planners and other interested parties, to get some retail provision on the new estate (at one time, there were even plans to convert the original proposed retail units into yet more housing!

So now you know - or at least my take on the issue.

Incidentally, the Post Office (where it is now used to be an Eastern Electricity retail shop) has expanded into next door, where there used to be a dry cleaners (even before the dry cleaners, it was a sports shop). Anyway, since the 'expansion' we now have a Spar convenience store, incorporating the Post Office, the dry cleaners (no dry cleaning on the premises - its all sent away), alimited range of Spar branded and mainstream branded grocery items and even (as if we didn't have enough facilities already)self service take-away coffee unit. Oh and by the way, the stationers, up on the High Street, 'The Knack', is rumoured to be closing down soon (lack of trade?) It used to be a Video hire Shop before it was a stationers - not sure what it was before that.

The 'proper' dry cleaners next door, 'Clean Stream' used to be an estate agents (no doubt competing with Brown's opposite). Not sure what it was immediately before that.

There is more but I'll save that for another time.

...

Since my last post I have received information that in fact, what is now the Chippy was the old launderette, so I am not sure what the big chemist might have been before Cooks/Lloyds. Someone out there will surely know.

A.D. XIII KAL. IAN. MMVI

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Ten years on the internet

As 2006 comes to an end, I am running out of time to say that I have been using the internet now for ten years. One of the first things I did, under the tutelage of sil, was to start writing my own pages, so I have been on the web for ten years too. I don't know what editor I used to edit those pages, although I remember only ever using Lynx to browse them while still at university, only being introduced to flashy new browsers with pictures the following year when I started work. Sadly no record exists of it on the Wayback Machine. The earliest existing version of webpage I have written is from June 2001, although the July 2001 version is more comprehensible.* The current version, which is basically a fancy list of links for work, is not really too different.

My first email was to Tim and easily persuaded me of the advantages of electronic communication. From the university's computer centre, I asked if he wanted to go for a drink. By chance he was also logged on somewhere in town and agreed. With little delay, therefore, we proceeded to the pub. In the days before mobile phones, this was something.

* Where it says Respect my authority! there should be an image of Cartman in policeman guise. The two words moo around the email address should have a little image of a cow similar to the icon you can see (hopefully) in the address bar above. I think the Cartoons image was a Dilbert image.

A.D. XIV KAL. IAN. MMVI

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You are person are of the year

005 (Well, it was on Ceefax). Time Magazine has named You person of the year, Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.

There is a word to describe this but I don't want to use it on my weblog, so I shall link to it here. I don't think any of those definitions really does the word justice except perhaps sense 4 of the artistwd entry. This is the trouble with American definitions of a British word. Anyway, here is the opening paragraph of the Time article to ram the point home, as it were:

The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

For your convenience, I have abbreviated the rest of the article thus:

...cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia...million-channel people's network YouTube...online metropolis MySpace...Tim Berners-Lee...Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0...revolution...from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing...rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms...Facebook...Second Life...Amazon...podcasts...global intellectual economy...seizing the reins of the global media...massive social experiment...

In a bucket.

A.D. XV KAL. IAN. MMVI

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001

001 again. For a fuller explanation, see Arantius Urus. Please note that the spelling of said weblog has been corrected since I first mentioned it. Aurantius would probably be something to do with the law of gold or golden soup, or nothing at all. Bodes well for the accuracy of the rest of the posts anyway.

PRID. ID. DEC. MMVI

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Copyright petition

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format. (Via sil).

I've signed up too. If our computer crashes again we come a step close to losing access to songs we paid money for.

A.D. XVII KAL. DEC. MMVI

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Salve munde

As a way of practising writing in Latin, I have started Aurentius Urus, a weblog written entirely in Latin, except for the bumf down the side and so on. If you really want to read a weblog in Latin with scintillating content, you are probably better off reading something like Mea Vita Fabulosa or Vir Cum Pluteo Pleno. I suspect they know more than two declensions and one and a half conjugations.

The main problem I foresee is writing about the modern world in an ancient language. Not having a Vatican Latin dictionary to hand, I will have to fall back on diligent research (e.g. this site suggests that ephemeris would be the Latin for weblog), sites like this list of computer terminology, and my own appalling sense of humour.

The site has been set up using WordPress so I only have to really think about the Latin rather than the Perl or MySQL and so I can have a go at a web-hosted weblogging system.

A.D. VI ID. NOV. MMVI

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Bad language in WW1 Belgium

I've just finished reading Tommy: the British soldier on the Western Front 1914-1918 by Richard Holmes. The apt timing is more by luck than judgement. There is an excellent section in the book on language, including swearing, which includes the following wonderful quote (p. 491-492):

The parish priest of the Belgian village of Dickebush [not the funny bit] was frankly puzzled by it all. 'I have looked it up phonetically in my little English dictionary (fahke),' he wrote.

And I find, to my surprise, that the word 'fake' means 'false, unreal, or not true to life'. Why the soldiers should refer to us in this way is difficult to understand, and yet everywhere one hears talk of 'fake Belgium' and 'fake Belgians'.

Although this may be a puerile example, this is in fact a very good book which looks at every aspect of army life on the Western Front. It makes even uninspiring subjects such as the rear base areas interesting and explains how cavalry was still useful in 1918. This and the similar Redcoat are highly recommended. I look forward to reading the next one which he is apparently working on, Sahib about the Indian army.

A.D. VIII ID. NOV. MMVI

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Exclusive car buying service for CILIP members

Exciting news from CILIP:

An exclusive car buying service has been secured from Nexus Cars as the latest addition to Special Deals for CILIP Members, the package of affinity benefits that provide extra value for CILIP membership.

Nexus Cars can deliver the lowest cost cars for CILIP members via a free service. Prices delivered are guaranteed to be the lowest - with the backing of a 110% price guarantee. Full details are available on a special website set up for CILIP members at www.nexuscars.co.uk/cilip.

Sign me up then.

A.D. IX KAL. NOV. MMVI

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Walk it

Simon Brunning points out a new service called Walk It which gives directions for pedestrians, much in the same manner as Google Maps does for cars. Mr Brunning gives a good overview of it, especially pointing out its fault in having no easy URL hackability. I must admit I still expected it to prefer a pedestrian option within reasonable limits, but no, it does the whole journey on foot, and gives helpful stats into the bargain. So, my trip home should take me a whisker over 12 hours walking fast, although I will burn off 3911 calories (approximately 17 Mars bars) in the process. The Google Maps equivalent is here (1 hour 24 minutes); the public transport version is 1 hour 20 minutes (using Transport Direct which doesn't seem to have reusable URLs either).

A.D. IX KAL. NOV. MMVI

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And that wants to be called for a Javascript program something

Cowthello is getting a reasonable number of referrals from Liste von Reversi/Othello-Spielen online, a list, in German, of 146 othello/reversi games available online. The write up for Cowthello- listed under Tom, not under Cowthello, number 12 last time I checked- says the following:

Eine lustige Variante mit Kühen als Spielsteinen und dazu gar nicht so schlecht. Ich konnte sie nicht auf Anhieb schlagen und laut einer mitgelieferten Tabelle hat sich das Programm auch ganz wacker gegen andere Programme behauptet. Und das will für ein Javascript-Programm etwas heißen.

I used Babelfish to translate this and was going to edit it slightly to make the English more natural. It is, however, so charming as it stands that I left it:

A merry variant with cows as Spielsteinen and in addition not at all so badly. I could not strike it at first attempt and according to a provided table the program also completely more wacker against other programs maintained myself. And that wants to be called for a Javascript program something.

As sil has pointed out before, this does need updating and the alpha-beta nettle needs to be grasped. Just not today. See if you can strike it.

A.D. XV KAL. NOV. MMVI

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Author and title matches

A colleague who is shortly retiring has for a long time compiled a list of books whose authors match the titles. Unlike these (including Hole in the mattress by Mr Completely and the more archaic Lilburn Stript and Whipt by Colonel Birch), the ones my colleague has collected are real and can be confirmed by visiting the catalogue she was working on when she spotted most of them.

I have obviously simplified the citation. The author in some cases is one of several and, if the second or third, wouldn't normally be cited as the main author; in one case the name given is an editor of an authored work and I haven't mentioned the main author; &c. I don't think this matters.

I am interested in trying to maintain this list and add to it. This is a hard topic to Google, although I did find a post about Author-title puns by Michael Hendry which had the following:

I used to think that Origen, On First Principles was the best-ever match of author to title, but have just run across the gloomy Sonnets de la Mort by the French Baroque poet Jean de Sponde.

Do suggest more if you know them. Please give evidence if you can: e.g. found on a particular catalogue, on Amazon, a bibliography (preferably on the web), etc. Do leave a comment (I don't get many) or email me.

A.D. XVI KAL. NOV. MMVI

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Excellent book title

I came across this excellent book title today: The techniques of sprang. The subtitle gives a little more away: Plaiting on stretched threads. Sprang is apparently an ancient fabric-making technique and is one of those words that is probably not nearly so funny after a slight acquaintance but which I think is excellent nonetheless. Incidentally the book is by Peter Collingwood.

A.D. IV ID. OCT. MMVI

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Catalogue language frequencies

One of our systems librarians wanted to create a language filter for the library catalogue and asked me for a list of codes, to which I replied with the MARC21 language code list, while recognising that this isn't really very useful. So, I offered to compile a list of common codes, thinking that this would be a matter of common sense and wouldn't be very long. However, reality and a need to take into account politics, together with various specialist collections and institutes with special language biases, made the list rather long. I sorted the list by numbers of records we have, which meant we could apply an objective cut-off. It's still difficult, as some of our prestige collections, such as Hebrew, which I would have included in any list without thinking, don't turn up as often as I would have thought. On the flip side, you can tell we recently merged with a specialist Eastern European studies institute by the second most common language on the list, which I reproduce below, although with the actual numbers of records omitted:

  1. English
  2. Russian
  3. German
  4. French
  5. Italian
  6. Polish
  7. Dutch
  8. Spanish
  9. Czech
  10. Hungarian
  11. Swedish
  12. Latin
  13. Norwegian
  14. Danish
  15. Finnish
  16. Hebrew
  17. Yiddish
  18. Bulgarian
  19. Croatian
  20. Icelandic
  21. Romanian
  22. Slovak
  23. Ukrainian
  24. Serbian
  25. Estonian
  26. Lithuanian
  27. Portuguese
  28. Latvian
  29. Greek, Ancient
  30. Belarusian
  31. Macedonian
  32. Slovenian
  33. Albanian
  34. Greek, Modern
  35. Welsh
  36. Afrikaans
  37. Turkish
  38. Catalan
  39. English, Middle
  40. Chinese
  41. Arabic
  42. English, Old
  43. Moldovan

However, I will say that English was about 10 times more common than Russian, with the frequencies declining gracefully thereafter. Taking the Eastern European languages out of the list, I am still surprised by German coming second rather than French. I suspect the Second World War has made us largely forget the importance of German as a cultural and academic language, e.g. in literature, archaeology, medicine, and philosophy (and probably Easter European studies).

The list is also quite badly skewed by errors and idiosyncracies in coding in the 008 field. E.g., English (eng) as the default in templates is often left there by mistake, the 041 is rarely entered fully, and one language I left off the list, Faroese, is represented in our catalogue by two codes, one of them wrong. Nevertheless, I think it is interesting.

A.D. V ID. OCT. MMVI

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Roman around York

As sil reports, the Gentlemen's Philosophical Society of Elvet visited York last weekend, visiting the Roman remains and seeking refreshment between academic endeavours. Our achievements included:

Some pictures I took which aren't too blurry and don't involve me are on Flickr.

* Although some problems still remain as to why a tower with ten angles is not called the Decangular Tower or similar. It is also arguable whether the angles differ in their extent, which might be another explanation. I could look it up.
** Although we did discuss the incident relating to the pub when A dispute between two 'Roman soldiers' in a 1st century bath house ended up in court when one man accused his rival of threatening to kill him with a replica helmet (from The Times).
*** And solved.

A.D. IV NON. OCT. MMVI

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Friend has weblog

Simon, the lyrical and vocal half of the highly influential band Territorial Mercenaries and his wife Alex have started a weblog: A Travers Adventure.

A.D. IV KAL. OCT. MMVI

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CILIP silent on public library problems

Following a continued attack by Tim Coates on the management and policies surrounding public libraries in the UK, Chris Armstrong criticises CILIP for failing to wade in. He makes a few points:

I am no expert on the actual situation of public library administration, management, or finance, so I will omit commenting on that, but what interests me here is the lack of leadership, and public advocacy by CILIP itself. The last point indeed highlights one of the reasons why I don't pay a CILIP membership subscription, something I (and Librarywebbie) have pointed out before. Ian Snowley, president elect of CILIP, said when I raised this on his weblog, I do agree that CILIP must do all it can to make an impact in the wider media on libray issues, and plans are in hand to improve its media presence. Here's one chance.

The above quotations from Chris Armstrong are only a selection from what he says. Do read the full arcticle.

A.D. VI KAL. OCT. MMVI

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Men's books

I recently went on an innocent trip to a Sandy charity shop the other week with my three year old son. After I had idly scanned the bookshelves for a short while, the mildly scary lady serving behind the counter asked if I was looking for men's books.

"Er...not really", I replied, "I'm not really sure what you mean by men's books anyway. Ha ha..."

"I've got a load out the back I can show you" she said. I think it was at this point I got worried. Only the presence of the aformentioned toddler reassured me that she might not be wishing to expose me to her special stash of second-hand charity shop mank.

Obediently, my son and I ventured into the back to be confronted with the predictable box of Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy clones*. "Men's books I call them". Some relief, I can tell you.

I always thought the back of the charity shop would be filled with untold delights that are kept back from the common herd. Unfortunately, I now know that I merely have to wait for the box of men's books to clear before anything good appears. Sue Ryder is much better anyway.

* Not that I mind such things, being a keen Frederick Forsyth fan myself when he's not being pants. I've also just read She by H. Ryder Haggard (bought from a charity shop) which is hardly pitched at the female market**.
** And is not, in my opinion, as good as Allan Quartermain, which is also better than King Solomon's Mines***.
*** Which, I would agree with Mr Haggard himself, is much better than Treasure Island.

A.D. VI KAL. OCT. MMVI

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Cow Solitaire on the radio

Cow Solitaire has been mentioned on national radio! I think. In any case, it appears on the website for Miles Mendoza's Website of the Day, which is part of Steve Wright in the Afternoon's no doubt excellent show on BBC Radio 2. It was apparently mentioned on Friday A.D. XVII KAL. OCT. MMVI, quote:

Thanks to Emma Mason for her email challenging me to find "a good cattle or livestock-related game for the weekend". Cow Solitaire does what it says on the tin - It's Solitaire with cows instead of marbles. Milk the Cow challenges you to click on as many cows as possible in order to fill your virtual bucket with milk.

If anyone can confirm this 10 seconds of fame I would be most grateful.

I tried to comment on Mr Mendoza's site to suggest that Cowthello might have been a more satisfying and interactive example, although he is no doubt too busy searching the web for similar gems to have time to approve my comment. Moreover, a link to http://www.aurochs.org/cows/games/ would have provided Ms Mason with far more choice. Anyway, it explains why this weblog started getting quite a few referrals from the Cow Solitaire page.

The research for the this article also threw up a more disturbing development. The rather unobvious idea of a cow-themed solitaire has now surfaced in physical format with the Haba Cow Solitaire board game, retailing at $12.39. Don't pay that kind of money: play for free!

A.D. XIII KAL. OCT. MMVI

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Benediction

I don't wish to pass comment on Mr Benedict's remarks except to say that The Sun's headline Pope on the ropes is ace.

A.D. XVI KAL. OCT. MMVI

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Bigger library in Sandy?

The Biggleswade Chronicle reports that Bedfordshire County Council, or rather their agents (presumably men in dark glasses and a local goverment pension scheme) are investigating the idea of spending £450,000 on developing Sandy Library. It probably won't happen anyway, but hopefully, they'll move Bedfordshire's cataloguing division to the new site.

I urge you to look at the picture accompanying the article. I'm sure that beardy man doesn't work in Sandy. It doesn't look like Sandy library. Heavens, it even looks like a manual issue system which they don't use anymore. Cripes, &c.

Although the picture is a stock one representing a vague subject, a practice even the BBC uses, do take note of the headline, which has been carefully thought out, and represents a fantastic addition to the corpus of library humour:

Hopes for new library volume

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, &c.

NON. SEPT. MMVI

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Cows probably don't have accents

Mark Liberman at* Language Log takes the scientific props away from the story that cows have accents, including quoting a testimony from John Wells, the linguist in question (and one of ours).

I particularly like Professor Wells's complaint about a PR company who issued the original press release on behalf of a Somerset cheese company:

They showed it to me only after they had sent it out, which meant that it was too late for me to protest that they had put into my mouth the solecism "This phenomena is...". Of course I would always say only "This phenomenon is..." or "These phenomena are".

*I refuse to use over at to refer to another weblog.

Update: More from Language Log and Professor Wells.

A.D. IX KAL. SEPT. MMVI

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Cows have accents

The BBC reports that researchers have found that cows have regional accents. Apparently birds do as well, although some farmers suggest a human cause that wouldn't be appropriate for birds:

Farmer Lloyd Green, from Glastonbury, said: "I spend a lot of time with my ones and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl."

Logically, then, French cows should have French accents, German cows should have German accents, etc. I would love to hear a Geordie moo.

A.D. X KAL. SEPT. MMVI

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Aurlog left out again

Aurlog has been left out of the Time Magazine 50 coolest websites again. I think it is because of Time's American bias. Out of the fifty, I think I've only visited Myspace and YouTube. That's how cool I am.

A.D. XVIII KAL. SEPT. MMVI

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Big Brother RSS feed yet again again

A little late as the final is this Friday, but I ought to mention that I noticed a week or two ago that the Big Brother site now has an RSS feed, part of a family of Channel 4 RSS feeds. The feed looks to be exactly the same (in output, I haven't checked the XML code) as mine except that a picture is added, something that I was loath to do anyway, thinking that republishing pictures is one step too many beyond screenscraping.

The other major difference is that the official feed already has 28 subscribers, on Bloglines anyway, despite its relative youth compared to the 2 subscribers (including myself, goodness knows who the other person was) that I generated.

I have to say I am actually quite vague about what happened in Big Brother this year as I have so many feeds set up in Bloglines that I have to filter my way through the same thing happening three or four times, on my feed, on Channel 4's, and on the Sun's feed (15 subscribers), which is independent as to content and is in many ways better than the official news. Next year should be easier.

A.D. XIX KAL. SEPT. MMVI

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Worldcat now on the web

OCLC have now put WorldCat (1.3 billion items in more than 10,000 libraries worldwide properly on the internet (rather than through Google or some other means). It says Beta although I don't know if this is a proper beta, although the write-up and other documentation don't seem to mention the fact at all, or a Google-style beta. Looks like the second.

The aim of the thing is clearly to enable one to find items locally. I tried to find Vromans's Perl pocket reference somewhere near my postcode, and managed to get to a good set of results on the third screen: I didn't even have to tell it that what I entered for location was a UK postcode (rather than a US zip code or a small town in Germany), a degree of intuition rare in library software. Cambridge University is actually not that far away really (28 km according to Worlcat), although the fact that the next two nearest libraries were Oxford and the British Library gives some idea of the paucity of coverage in the UK: the next nearest location is Institut informacijskih znanosti / Knjinica in Sloveniaafter which I'm looking at McGill in Canada and the Boston Public Library. All for so little a book.

Although not properly FRBRised, the interface is refreshingly helpful in narrowing down large results sets, having options that look a little like the gubbins on the left of this weblog. For instance, search for Hard Times and you get about 5300 results. The five most popular authors are listed on the left. Click on Dickens and you're on a more manageable 156. Click on Book format and you're down to 153. Click on English language and you're down to 119. This leaves you with a further choice of dates. These choices are only the five most popular, which is a shame (well, it doesn't clog the screen up which is definitely a good thing), especially in this case the top five dates are 1900, 1800, 1901, 1910, and 1880. A majority of all these hits are not actual editions from those dates, but unknown publication dates, where the cataloguer has put [19--?], or in one case [1---] (which means that the cataloguer knew which millenium the item was published but not the year, decade, or even century). For comparison, I tried our catalogue, which is for a large university research library (about 1 million records compared to 1.3 billion), and got 40 hits, had to go to a separate screen coyly marked Filter and use some pull-down boxes to get 6 results which looked on the nail.

For me, what seems very promising is what Lorcan Dempsey mentions: a simple syntax for linking. The example he gives is http://worldcat.org/isbn/0679454438 for The road to reality by Roger Penrose. If nothing else, this might be a better way of referring to a book rather than linking to an Amazon record. It looks neater, should be more accurate and complete, and even lets you buy from Amazon using a link on the right. It could be the book equivalent of the ubiquitous IMDB link. The only problem is I couldn't see any documentation on how to do it on the WorldCat site. Incidentally, the aforementioned book can apparently be found in Bedfordshire Libraries, which gives the lie to my comments above about poor coverage, which applies only to Perl books.

WorldCat also lets one put a searchbox on your site, which is modelled below:

It should work, so do try it. All very good, although the scary list of terms and conditions and personal details needed for registration seems a reassuring return to a more-library-like fear of loss of control and openness.

A.D. VI ID. AUG. MMVI

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The value of CILIP

In lieu of a proper post, I would like to point you in the direction of a post on Ian Snowley's weblog from April about the Value of CILIP on which we had a short exchange of comments. Ian Snowley went to a meeting with other CILIP councillors at which Bob McKee suggested an exercise to assess the value of CILIP membership:

Bob started by asking us to list the five main benefits that members receive from CILIP:

And then asked us to put a value on them, on a monthly basis - taking into account what we spend on other 'comparable' activities.

I disagreed with his conclusions: The main reason I have never been a member of CILIP is that I don't think it is worth the money. I could quote the whole post, but probably best to read it there.

A.D. VII ID. AUG. MMVI

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New cow game: Cow Tipping

John Phethean of Pave Graphics recently emailed me about a whack-a-rat style Flash game he has written for the A-Coo-Stik site. The game is Cow Tipping and is very hard, so far as I've tried it.

I've added it to the canonical list of cow games.

A.D. IV NON. AUG. MMVI

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Top of the Pops gone

Top of the Pops has now gone and thank goodness. At least now we will now not have to endure stories of its decline, relaunch, and relaunch. The last five years or so has been a bit like watching Tim Henman at Wimbledon: he's still number 1, they say, but still fails to produce the goods. I blame the miming. And the shit music. A more thoughtful, and probably accurate, analysis has been provided by yet another BBC navel-gazing article.

PRID. KAL. AUG. MMVI

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004

004, barring a thousand tweaks and additions. Now my weblog looks like everyone else's.

A.D. VI KAL. AUG. MMVI

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Willington rowing lake to go ahead

The BBC reports that the proposed Olympic rowing lake at Willington will go ahead despite the inadequate local transport and the fact it will most likely scupper the Bedford to Cambridge railway proposals. All for a crappy training lake- it won't actually see any competition- which will probably be largely useless come 2013. At least it will be part of a larger park, although I'm not sure what the effect will be on the existing cycle path between Sandy and Bedford via Willington (which would of course be banjo'd if the railway was to come in any case).

In other Bedfordshire train news, the police have introduced a passenger metal detector scanning pilot at Flitwick station of all places. I appreciate Luton has rather put Bedfordshire on the terror map, but really. I like that Inspector John Seamarks of British Transport Police said that Flitwick is not noted for high levels of violent disorder or anti-social behaviour and this operation is aimed at keeping it that way throughout the summer holidays when many young people use the trains to travel from town to town. Obviously, it's best to concentrate resources on places that have no crime in order to make sure that there isn't any.

A.D. XIII KAL. AUG. MMVI

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Tory rail reorganisation

According to Conservative Home, the Conservatives, or David Cameron as they're now known, are thinking about reorganising the railways so that companies run both track and trains, which I believe is how the Japanese do these things. Apparently this would be more efficient and require less subsidy. Hurray.

The article also seems to suggest that a Review of the rail network by the Conservative Party is in the offing. I'm not sure how this squares with the quite definite plans outlined above. Maybe the review will be like an undergraduate essay with all the formalities of research and reading done after the essay has been largely written.

A.D. XVI KAL. AUG. MMVI

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Sandy pubs

Pubchatter has interesting and fairly accurate description of Sandy. Most of the article is, naturally enough, about the pubs of the town which, sadly, I am not actually that greatly experienced enough to argue with. However this short run-in to the article gives a fair impression:

The town has many hairdressers, a great kebab house (which does fantastic pizza), a bakery, a butchers and a nail/tanning place and as well as the other essentials, like Budgens (which is a small supermarket for those of you who haven't had the pleasure!), several Estate Agents and a bookies.

As an aside, it doesn't add that Sandy, for such a small town, tends to have two of things: two Lloyds chemists a few doors down from eachother, one of them sizeable; two Forbuoys newsagents across the market square from eachother, and now two Budgens, since the new little one finally filled the vacancy on the Fallowfield estate to the north of the town.

As a further aside, the bakery is cracking if not spectacular, especially for the price. And, note that it's not just me mentioning the number of hairdressers.

I do agree that the Queen's Head is my favourite pub, as it is for my Dad who usually insists on a visit when he comes to see us. We contemplated a visit to the Lord Roberts one time, but when I explained that they had discontinued the meat raffles and the karaoke, whose ghostly wailing used to drift across the deseted market square on winter evenings, in favour of something more akin to Weatherspoons, he was put off and we went to the Queen's Head again. I think it was the word Weatherspoons that did it. I haven't gone back to the Bell since I went in there one summer's afternoon, was made to feel like a nuisance because I wasn't a regular clogging up the bar space, and was served a shandy where (and I'm no connoisseur) both the beer and the lemonade tasted so watered down we couldn't finish it. I'm sure that was a just a bad day.

A.D. IV NON. IUL. MMVI

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Work to do in Arlesey

Someone in Arlesey has some work to do on his house.

KAL. IUL. MMVI

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Big Brother RSS feed yet again

Big Brother are apparently introducing RSS feeds amongst other changes. Hurrah: I shall see what it looks like. In the meantime, try mine. Incidentally, in the comments to the last article, David Holtz suggested using FeedFire. I couldn't get any satisfactory results with it myself as the feed David had set up confined itself to headlines and, more importantly, the site needed payment as far as I could tell in order to do even the most rudimentary configuration.

Getting back to Big Brother, it does seem odd timing to introduce such changes to their site. I can't believe my own comments have had that much impact, but I do notice that even the Sun is offering a Big Brother RSS news feed, though not of course matching the news as delivered by Big Brother.

On a related note, I came across the Radio Times Big Brother Blog (via Jack Mottram), which is worth a read, though mostly opinion rather than news as such.

A.D. III KAL. IUL. MMVI

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Unstoppable passengers meet immovable passengers

A wonderful occurence this morning on the train from Sandy to Finsbury Park. There is a special timetable today with fewer and shorter trains only running to Finsbury Park instead of Kings Cross because of yesterday's fire at Kings Cross. The crowded and delayed train eventually made it to Finsbury Park with only one woman nearly fainting through standing. However, the driver then said that they couldn't let us off said crowded train because of overcrowding on the platform. A dilemma that one, but they managed to solve it by getting people dressed in yellow to walk and down and look exasperated for a bit.

The resultant tube journey to cover the last leg to Kings Cross was actually not as unpleasant as many I did at rush hour when I lived in London. I'm tempted to take the Midland Mainline to Bedford again tonight and get the rail replacement bus to Sandy: the Meridian trains they use have declassified first class seating for plebs like me who know about it to fill up (because of a mistake when ordering the trains). This made yesterday's journey very pleasant if it wasn't for the woman next to me slamming her phone down all the time because she couldn't get a signal. Anyway.

A.D. V KAL. IUL. MMVI

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Buffy library playset

After the toy librarians comes a Buffy school library playset (again via Catalogablog) which actually looks to be genuine: $51 and delivered in three days.

A.D. VI KAL. IUL. MMVI

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Arlesey still strange for the World Cup

The Biggleswade Chronicle reports that the house in Arlesey with the cross of St George on it has gone football crazy by not removing said cross, although I notice that the picture does have the word Robbed removed. Will they have to get back up a ladder to write it again or will they try and fit in Fairly beaten on the day in the space provided?

ID. IUN. MMVI

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Paul Daniels's eBay transactions

I recently found a weblog recording all the eBay transactions of Paul Daniels (via Jack Mottram). It contains quite stunning descriptions of the items bought, mainly DVDs it seems, as well as blow by blow accounts of sales:e.g.,

On March 20th 2006 Paul Daniels sold two different Mamiya cameras on ebay making £328.80 in the process. Well done Paul!

I'll do what I can to describe the two auctions with as much detail as possible although it might get complicated because they both had multiple bidders involved.

The resulting description reads like Rimmer's description of a game of Risk:

...That was soon doubled by rcdrake but eleganceglassware stole a march on them with bids of £55, £59 and £63 before dewdropn announced a presence with a £70 bid. mahluf was in the lead with an almost unbelievable £70.03 but surat19 made a more sensible offer of £75. dewdropn reentered the game by also bidding £75 and so surat19 went to £77...

Fascinating stuff. I really wish I had that much time on my hands.

A.D. VIII ID. IUN. MMVI

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Toy librarians

I'm not normally a fan of self-conscious library humour, but these toy librarians in the manner of toy soldiers (via Catalogablog) are wonderful.

NON. IUN. MMVI

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Big Brother 2006 RSS feed that actually works

The Big Brother rss feed I created with Feed43 didn't work. Although the feed seemed OK if you went and checked it, and although it presented very nicely when it did work, it never seemed to update on Bloglines, giving an error signal for days on end before spluttering into life again. No good and it seems I am not alone. I experimented with a few other screen-scraping feed creators:

I therefore had a go at doing it myself using PHP and a couple of regular expressions, and managed to make a feed identical (in output if not in XML coding) to the Feed43 one. And it works. Feed: http://www.aurochs.org/internet/blogging/bb.php. After doing this I wonder whether Feed43 will really have a market as the sort of people who can make sense of terms like 'whitespace' and symbols like {*}, {_}, and {%} will probably be OK doing their own exactly as they want it with a little code and a regular expression.

KAL. IUN. MMVI

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CILIP's membership message

CILIP (via Edith Speller) have come up with a shortlist of 'membership messages', the idea being that:

If someone asks you "why join CILIP?" can you give a simple, compelling answer?

Well, apparently now you can, and since I have been asking this question for a while now, I was most intrigued to know what these compelling reasons are. You will have to look at the website via the link above to see what the items on the shortlist actually are, as this organisation for information professionals has provided the list as an image without any alternative text, so I can't cut and paste some examples. Thank goodness my visual impairment only extends as far as short-sightedness.

However, they are all of the following ilk:

CILIP: progressing your career, advancing your knowledge

Presumably this knowledge doesn't include web standards. In all seriousness, what use is a phrase like that to someone who wants to know why they should join CILIP? Maybe they should stick to paying people to join.

PRID. KAL. IUN. MMVI

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Big Brother 2006 rss feed

As a follower of Big Brother I am always disappointed that they don't have an rss feed for their news. So, I decided to use Feed43 which screenscrapes websites to provide feeds, with a little setting up. I configured a feed which you can find at http://feed43.com/bigbrother.xml. I have subscribed to it on Bloglines and will see how it goes over the next few days.

A.D. VII KAL. IUN. MMVI

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Lordi Lordi it's Eurovision!

It's Eurovision this weekend, and the highlight this year seems to be Finland, who have entered a death metal band called Lordi (the Lord). As the BBC reports, there are five band members whose real names are apparently a mystery but "are known as Amen the unstoppable mummy, Enary the manipulative valkyrie, Kalma the biker-zombie and Kita the alien manbeast"; vocals are by Lordi, whose real name Wikipedia actually gives as Tomi Putaansuu. And these are not just here for Eurovision: the Wikipedia entry for the group Lordi also reveals that they have four albums (one a compilation for the UK market) under their belt and have already shed three members, two of them apparently still in the line up according to the BBC. Who knows?

Sadly, Finland do not have an automatic bye to the final like the UK, so they have to get through the semi final on Thursday. As a BBC licence-payer I won't be able to see it as it's on BBC3. But never mind. May the predictions of Monty Python not come true this year:

You're so sadly neglected
And often ignored,
A poor second to Belgium,
When going abroad.

Full song here.

In addition, Acid for Blood has some pictures drawn from flickr and a video from YouTube. The BBC of course also has audio of the song (Hard Rock Hallelujah) which I have still not actually heard.

A.D. XVII KAL. IUN. MMVI

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Dan Brown Book Generator

Toby Inkster has created a Create Your Own Dan Brown Novel programme. Use your browser's 'Reload' button to create another novel, each one as original and well thought out as a real Dan Brown best-seller. Via Velcro City Tourist Board).

A.D. V ID. MAI. MMVI

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Smithy Code solved

I'm a bit slow off the mark on this one, I know, but the code hidden by the judge (Mr Justice Smith) in the recent Dan Brown trial has been solved (via Rashbre Central). According to the judge as reported by the BBC the mistake in the code was intentional:

Mr Justice Smith said a typographical error had been added deliberately to 'create further confusion'

A.D. VII ID. MAI. MMVI

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Da Vinci judge writes his own code

The BBC reports that the judge of the recent Dan Brown/Holy Blood Holy Grail (HBHG) plaigarism trial apparently left his own code in the judgement on the case. There are letters in italics which seem to spell out some words. Good stuff. He has apparently agreed to confirm it if anyone cracks it.

This makes sense of why the judgement took so long to come out. Interestingly I noticed that the judgement also admits that he had read HBHG several times over the last twenty years. Oh dear.

A.D. V KAL. MAI. MMVI

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CILIP debates

Tom Roper links to a couple of interesting online debates concerning CILIP and its purpose, particular one on Freepint.

I'm playing with weblog setup, in particular tags, so if this post keeps reappearing and changing I apologise.

A.D. V KAL. MAI. MMVI

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Happy Easter

Easter, the time when we celebrate the death and alleged resurrection of the founder of the Merovingian dynasty by eating chocolate is almost upon us and the famously secular college for whom I work are good enough to give us a week off while they are closed. As I blog mostly on work computers, I will say Happy Easter and see you next week. To keep you going, a short guide to Easter:Tomorrow is Monday Thursday. Friday is Good because of Hot Cross Buns, which are on a perpetual buy one get one free offer. Sunday is Easter as also is Monday.

You see, I need the week off.

PRID. ID. APR. MMVI

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Da verdict

The Da Vinci Code trial ended last Friday with the judge finding in favour of Mr Brown. I think this was the only realistic verdict. As George MacDonald Fraser said in the Telegraph at the weekend:

They've got to lose that case ... If they win it's going to make writing historical fiction very difficult. Anyway, as I understand it, there's no copyright in ideas.

However, it would have been far more entertaining had the the verdict gone the other way. I don't know quite how these things work, whether it would have come down to enormous damages or cessation of Da The Vinci Code's sale, but it would certainly have thrown a spanner in the works of the forthcoming film (tagline Seek the truth). As it is, the conspiracy of the Templars (the Temple in London is still linked to the law in England!), masons (everyone knows all judges are masons!), and the Priory of Sion (a secret society, which is why they weren't overtly connected to the trial, although they surely must have been!) won after all and Baigent and Leigh are effectively ruined. Anyway, there is a trailer for the film on Google Video. I have my suspicions the film will be better than the book.

Aside from the news page linked above, the BBC offer a number of interesting pages on the trial:

Roll on the film this Christmas on ITV!

A.D. IV ID. APR. MMVI

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Backgammon luck

Sil, who has for some time refused to play backgammon with me after a series of (admittedly often close) thrashings may find some comfort in the following, which I found on Wikipedia. It concerns one of the earliest backgammon playing computers, BKG 9.8:

by July 1979, BKG 9.8 was ready to play against then current world champion Luigi Villa. It won the match, 7-1, becoming the first computer program to defeat a world champion in any game, although this was mostly a matter of luck, as the computer happened to get better dice rolls than its opponent in that match.

On a related note, Cowthello has now been de-XHTML'd so should work properly again. One day I mean to programme a 3-ply version using the alpha-beta algorithm without tying myself in knots. Until then, you'll have to make do with this.

NON. APR. MMVI

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Brutal ice cream

Ben and Jerry are bringing out the following new flavour of ice cream (via Crooked Timber):

Ben and Jerry Black and Tan ice cream

I thought this might be an April Fool, but it seems to be persisting in a convincing manner at the Ben and Jerry website. There is apparently a popular drink in the US called Black and Tan which I confess to never having heard of. However, as Crooked Timber put it, how will they marketing this in Ireland? I can't believe the scores of highly paid corporate advertisers missed this one. To be honest, I can't imagine it tasting too good either, but I'm willing to give it a go.

NON. APR. MMVI

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New train company

There is now a new train company running through Sandy: First Capital Connect. This is rather a rubbish, overlong, and ambiguous if innocuous name. By my reckoning, First operate 6 services 'connecting' to the capital in some way. Still, it's amusing to hear the announcers at King's Cross stumbling over the name. I expect they were glad when the old franchisees, WAGN (West Anglia Great Northern) initially lost the West Anglian bit of their franchise, forcing announcers to say WAGN as a word or initials to prevent the name being a nonsence. They're not laughing now. When I set up my own train operating company, I'm going to call it Red Lorry Yellow Lorry Rail or some such.

No dramatic changes yet. Although I notice that they were very quick to get their staff in new uniforms and the automated announcements (not used at Kings Cross) changed immediately. Either they dug that man who's been doing the announcements across the south east for the last fifty years out of retirement or they've got some flashy voice sampling system going. The WAGN website has also disappeared very quickly. I wonder if FCC, as those of us in the know will no doubt start calling them, will change the livery of the trains and the stations as quickly. It took WAGN ages to do the latter, although I prefer their purple to FCC's blue (you could have guessed that). As for the trains, the old ones have changed a lot, but the networkers are still mostly in British Rail Network Southeast colours.

Most importantly, I missed out on the FCC goodie bags yesterday as I came in late and my train came into platform one at King's Cross. Damn.

PRID. NON. APR. MMVI

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Librarian weighs in

An alleged librarian has demostrated his thorough training and professional skills with the following review of Da The Vinci Code, as found by The Da Vinci Hoax weblog on a bookseller's website:

Brandon Vanover (firekiller814@hotmail.com), a Librarian, March 20, 2006,
Get over it
The Da Vinci code was a work of fiction, which means it WASN'T MEANT TO BE REAL. Dan Brown is an excelent writer who had an idea and wrote on it. Just like any excelent writers out there. Most of the anti Da Vinci Code fanatics are just christians with a grudge and need to realize that the bible is also a book and cant be proved to be entirely factual either. I dont understand why people have to complain about fictional books, their not real

Mr Vanover (must be an anagram) and the rest of us will have to wait, probably till Easter, to hear the result of Mr Brown's trial. I can't imagine the judge summarising any more concisely than that.

A.D. III KAL. APR. MMVI

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Unusual radio stations, or, How to offer criticism of two radio stations I've never even listened to

One product of the podcastItuneStreaMedia and all that newfangled kind of thing seems to be the introduction of new and interesting radio stations. For example, there is the now established LugRadio, a fortnightly British radio show that takes a relaxed, humorous look at Linux and open source. On face of it, not exactly my cup of tea, although I haven't actually listened to it and Tim, who has been kind enough to laugh at my jokes before, assures me that it is in fact very good and funny, even though one can hardly describe him as a geek.

Now I hear of something far more adventurous: LisRadio (or LiS Webcast as they sometime call themselves on their webpage in defiance of any authority control) (via Library Stuff). For those not in the know, LIS generally stands for Library and Information Science, or something along those lines. LisRadio's aim is as follows:

We hope to present interesting and stimulating conversations with movers, shakers, and the odd gadfly or two in libraryland.

I have to admit that this doesn't sound like my idea of an entertaining evening. I expect the fact that it comes from the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri-Columbia might also detract from the fun somewhat, although it has a much more educational purpose than LugRadio: broadcasts will be made by department staff, at meetings of masters students, and used in the courses. Perhaps I find it hard to think of a radio station not being entertainment or current affairs. In any case, I have to say I admire a library department that puts so much energy into exploring new technology (mine wouldn't even teach us MARC21 in 2000), although I may wait for Tim to tell me what it's actually like to listen to.

A.D. IV KAL. APR. MMVI

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Tinyurl

I've yet to use it, but tinyurl looks very useful. You can submit a url such as http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?G2M?X=426940&Y=541132&A=Y&Z=1 and register it a short form such as http://tinyurl.com/jz258, which is more convenient to put in email, etc. Try it. This is free, instant, and apparently permanent. Via a newsletter from our vice-provost; I expect the rest of the world knew about this anyway.

A.D. IV KAL. APR. MMVI

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Tradition

There was a very interesting post last week at Crooked Timber about how traditional modern society is:

...we are now living in a society that's far more tradition-bound than that of the 19th Century, and in some respects more so than at any time since at least the Middle Ages.

It also refers to a comment given in a previous post suggesting that even this observation about traditions is traditional:

Ironically, the tradition of insisting that traditions are mostly recent is actually quite old. Centuries before Eric Hobsbawm, philologists like Lorenzo Valla and Isaac Casaubon were demonstrating that ancient texts weren't ancient at all.

A.D. IV KAL. APR. MMVI

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Mozart

Coming home latish on Friday, we went past Budgens in Sandy. There were some youths a little distance away, who were presumably deterred from actually blocking the entrance to the supermarket by the sounds of Mozart's Requiem being played in the doorway. I had heard that playing music was being used to deter undesirable young people from nice sheltered community spaces like shop doorways. But Mozart's Requiem?! Playing one of the most wonderful pieces of music ever written is hardly going to work is it? If they played Frank Sinatra or Gilbert & Sullivan then I might understand. It explains why the youths were not far away in any case: they wanted to listen; and, seeing as Budgens had only started playing the Kyrie, they weren't going to get rid of them for about another hour.

Last night, our three year old son was a bit anxious about the noise of the wind coming down the chimney, so we set up my wife's ipod and the little speakers from the computer with a classical selection. I'm sure you can guess what piece of music gave the little one enough peace to drop to eventually drop off the sleep...

A.D. V KAL. APR. MMVI

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Lewis Perdue and the Dan Vinci Code case

Earlier today I came across The Da Vinci Crock, a weblog detailing the progress of the Dan Holy Vinci case. (Be careful accessing the site, using Mozilla at least, as a highly annoying pop-up pops us trying to elicit money for the Hurricane Katrina appeal and flickers annoyingly). I wondered what beef the author had to go in it into such detail until I researched the author, Lewis Perdue, whom, I must admit, I had never heard of, and found that, as reported by the BBC:

In August [2005], Mr Brown won a court ruling against another writer, Lewis Perdue, who claimed The Da Vinci Code copied elements of two of his novels, Daughter of God and The Da Vinci Legacy.

Mr Perdue had sought $150m (£84m) in damages and asked the court to block distribution of the book and the movie adaptation, currently in production.

I later found, in true Baigent and Leigh researching style, that the Crock was started in April 2005 with the intention

to provide as complete a resource as possible for the many well-documented books, articles and blogs that have likewise detected the bull offal essence of the Code. Prodigious quantities of this essence has been detected.

I notice that my own reference to the Crock in relation to Mr Brown's oeuvre marginally postdates Mr Perdue's weblog. I can honestly say that I have never read anything by Mr Perdue and only one thing by Mr Brown. I intend to keep it this way, although I will follow the Crock with interest.

A.D. III ID. MART. MMVI

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The cost of justice

For the past week British taxpayers have been paying a High Court judge just under £3000 to read the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code. From the BBC today:

The case resumed on Tuesday after a week-long break to give the judge time to read both books involved and related materials.

I don't know whether to pity the man or whether he is just the tool of karma which had to find a victim for all the people who have said, "You'd have to pay me to read that!" One wonders whether the judge read all the appendices to the Holy Blood or not. I expect he'll save them for when he needs to nod off in court.

By the way, the figure of £3000 comes from the salary of a High Court judge given by the Department of Constitutional Affairs wef April 2005, £155,404, divided by 52 (actually 2988.54 but you get the idea).

NON. MART. MMVI

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