Quote of the 'Week'

"Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all."
Voltaire
Discovering that someone has commented on one of my blogs is such a joyous feeling. Hint, bloody hint!

Wednesday 29 July 2009

Faceblogging

This blog is now available through my Facebook profile. Every time I post something up here, Facebook turns it into a note. This means that by clicking a few buttons until you get a full list of my notes on Facebook, you essentially have my blog. Rather nifty, I expect you'll concur.

I did this the other day, but as I needed an excuse to post something up on this blog o'mine, I looked back over the past week's events. The only two vaguely interesting things that happened of late were the blog/Facebook team-up (that sounds so cool; 'Faceblog... UNITE!') and the phenomenally persistent spell of rain that Lincolnshire has been experiencing (along with the rest of England, I'd wager), and as I didn't want to fall into that British stereotype and drone on about the weather (as much as I really want to), I decided to resort to the Faceblog approach (I like that word now).

Sorry, I just realised that I kept cutting my sentences up with bracketed interruptions.

Too many brackets spoil the... er... broth. No, wait. Too many soups spoil the br... breakfast... no.... Too many sentences spoil the cooks... Hang on, I'll get this in a moment.
Too many... brackets... spoil the... sentence? That'll do.

My worst fears are coming into fruition: this blog post is disintegrating into gibberish at an alarming rate.

Abort! Abort!

NOTE: This blog post has been prematurely terminated due to a psychological implosion on the part of the blogger. Normal service will resume in due course.

Monday 27 July 2009

Noel flaming Edmonds!

The more astute of you blog-gogglers may have made some assumptions about this blog post, based upon the title. You assume that just because I entitle the post with an angry exclamation directed at Noel Edmonds, this blog post is going to be a continuation of the earlier rant about Deal or No Deal. You and your bloody assumptions.

Well, you're right. I am going to continue to slag off Deal or No Deal.
Part two of this rant comes two blog posts after part one because I couldn't think of anything to complain about. I had effectively exhausted my ammunition on the first rant.
But then, like some Arsenal shirt-wearing angel, Mister Josh Shaw did descend from the heavenly clouds of Facebook, and he did provide me with a shiny new reason to despise DoND. Thanks, Josh!

The Deal or No Deal: Seaside Specials.

What was THAT all about? I kind of understand the thinking behind having a seaside special, what with the seaside being synonymous with summer, but did they have to dress up all the contestants in stupid costumes? There were sailor suits, straw hats, stripy swimming costumes and inflatable armbands all over the ruddy place.
...I think Noel was wearing a stupid costume as well, but you can never be sure with him...
Furthermore, the one person with the most embarrassing costume, a chap wearing a swimming vest, swimming shorts/trousers and the aforementioned armbands, was 'randomly' chosen to play the game! He seemed like an enthusiastic fellow, but I bet he wished that he was chosen a few weeks later, when he could have negotiated life-changing sums of money in slightly less ridiculous attire. I felt sorry for him, even if he didn't feel sorry for himself.
The sight of all these people, people who look like captive vaudevillians forced to play this insane game and pretend to like it, is truly something that will never leave me until the day I die. They stand there, staring at the player with such intensity and concentration. They're just doing that because they're on the telly, and they want to look like they give a toss about the financial future of Bernard from Basingstoke.

Furthermore, they use this as an excuse to get a little extra money from a company that provides them with holidays to give away as prizes to certain contestants. But these contestants aren't just given the holidays, oh no. They have to pick between two flavours of ice cream, one of which will give them the holiday, the other of which will enable the Banker to see what the player has in their box, potentially shifting the nature of the offers. This is hardly a game of skill. It's just more guesswork. The whole game is guesswork.
Guess which boxes have the small money in!
Guess what stage you should accept the Banker's offer before the offers drop!
Guess what flavour of ice cream will get you a holiday in Costa Rica!
There is no skill involved in Deal or No Deal, and these Seaside Specials, instead of taking this opportunity to inject a bit of actual skill into the game, just slap on another few dollops of guesswork and put the kids of the people running the costume department through college!

Pitiful.
I still watched it, though. And furthermore, I've come up with a better metaphor to describe why I watch Deal or No Deal. It's like a freak show. Simple as that. "Roll up! Roll up! See Noel, the Man-Lion, as he tricks simpletons with boxes into thinking they're making complex business negotiations!"

At ease.

Ramble Time!

I haven't posted up a good ramble in donkey's years. So here's one.
Just to explain the term 'ramble' based on its application in this blog, a 'ramble' is a blog post that is one hundred percent improvised. I have to rely on my writing abilities to keep the blog post going for as long as I can without it descending into unimaginative drivel.
I explain this because quite a few people have started to follow my blog since I last rambled. I think it's about time that these newbies were introduced to this wonder.

Right, so off we go. Well, I suppose I could start by referring back to the beginning of this post, where I used the phrase 'donkey's years'. Now, what is meant by that phrase? I know it means a long time, but when inventing this phrase, why did they pick on the donkey? To my knowledge, they aren't that slow - disgruntled donkeys have been known to lash out with lightning-fast rapidity. Is it something to do with the speed at which they age? Do donkeys age particularly quickly? I know that people refer to a dog year as one seventh of a human year (which, by the way, is a method founded on bullshit), but is a donkey year any shorter? I assume that is what they were getting at with the phrase, that there are more donkey years in a human year and this allows for some clever-sounding hyperbolic time-based exaggerations.

You know what? I'm going to look it up. Right now. I'll look the phrase up, and get back to you.

...

Well, it turns out that the phrase may have originated from rhyming slang, as one alternative to the phrase was 'donkey's ears', which rhymes, of course, with years. This could have been the original pronounciation. So it would appear that at some point, people just couldn't be arsed to rhyme any more, so they went for the more direct approach (defeating the objective of rhyming slang...) and just used the word 'years'.
Oh, those lazy olden-days people!
Then, when people started to say 'donkey's years', they may have thought it to be an allusion to the lifespan of a donkey (which, in direct contrast to my theory and more logically, is quite long). The source from where I obtained this information mentions a Blackpool donkey by the jolly old name of Lively Laddie, who died aged 62.

Heh. You learn something new every day. Now you can't say you don't learn something from this blog! Nyah!

Anyway, must be toddling off now. Auf Wiedersehen, etc.

Saturday 25 July 2009

Great Grimsby, Summer Holidays! What are you doing to me?

It's now officially the Summer Holidays. Not just the extra-early holidays that we post-GCSE students got this year, but for everyone. The Holiday has officially begun.

And that just seems to make everything duller.

It shouldn't really have any effect on me, as I've already been off school for weeks and weeks. But the knowledge that the six-week slog has only just really started hit me as hard as any four-to-fifteen-year-old. Time just seems to slow to the pace of a sloth with sciatica, and the days never seem to end. Ever. I have only just come to accept that all previous days actually ended at some point, but am still coming to terms with the fact that this very day will also reach an end eventually. Apparently, the clock says it's half eight in the evening, so things look hopeful for the arrival of tomorrow. Roll on Sunday, I say, and don't spare the horses!

Anyway, I'm dilly-dallying to an extent, so I apologise, and grab myself by the shirt collar and drag myself back onto the road, again to tentatively venture forth to a valid point to ever making this blog post.
With the the Holidays bludgeoning me with the boredom stick every 20 minutes, I have to find something to do. So I started to do two things. ...No, not including that.
The first thing I started to do was read books. This is a nice change, as I really like reading. Unfortunately, reading falls under the category of activities that are very easily, and unfairly, dismissed as boring by even the most loyal of book-readers, given enough time away from them. In this sense, they are a bit like Pringles or Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (I have fallen in love with that show all over again).

Speaking of gameshows hosted by blond people with strange voices who needlessly terrify their contestants and engulf their audiences in darkness, I have also taken to watching Deal Or No Deal. Less because I admire the quality of the show, more because it's a trumped-up pile of exaggerated guesswork and is absolutely hilarious.
Noel friggin' Edmonds is a wonder, that chap. Honestly. He baffles me. Here is a man, a very successful man, who not only rivals Simon Cowell in trouser altitude, but has hair like a lion, wears shirts that could trigger epilepsy in Stevie Wonder himself, and also - here's the kicker - he seems to genuinely believe that Deal or No Deal is a game of skill. I mean, I ask you. I bet the contestants who are chosen to appear on that show are initially intelligent, level-headed people that know that they are going to go home with more than when they arrived, and don't care if they have £250,000 box and except a 'paltry' £24,000 or whatever. They have to appear on every episode until they're chosen to play, opening boxes over and over and over again, and I think this softens their brains. By the time they are picked to have a go at 'beating the Banker' (or, as they've started to say, 'spanking the Banker' - blech), they're nothing short of clinically insane, and are easily moulded by Mr Edmonds into thinking that there's a lot of skill involved in playing the game.
Noel says things like "This game is taking a turn for the worse," or "Yesterday, Suzie left the game with 50p. The day before, Nigel from Ipswitch diddled the Banker out of £63,000. Before Nigel, old Gwen unfortunately won £50. I like the pattern that's emerging. See you tomorrow." What the hell is he blathering on about? He himself tells us at the beginning that the quantities of money (or should I say 'signs with numbers on') are randomly assigned to the inside of the lids of the boxes, and yet he has the idiotic audacity to claim that patterns emerge in the gameplay, and that any coincidence that happens to occur in a gameshow that is broadcast every day is suddenly an almighty sign, a method by which we can predict the future!

...bugger off, Edmonds.
Saying that, I do like to watch DoND. In the same way that I like to watch when a car is hit by a van over the road from where I am standing.

I will continue my rant about Deal or No Deal another time. For now, it's 8 out of 10 Cats, and I'm missing it.

Ciao.

Sunday 19 July 2009

Good Golly.

fail owned pwned pictures
see more Fail Blog

Thursday 16 July 2009

Any Old Pap

Will reclined dismissively in the computer chair, and groped his glass of cola. 16:46, and twenty-nine seconds.
Thirty.

Thirty-one.
Thirty-two.
Thirty-three.
The distant sound of the front door opening awakened Will from his comatose state, but returned to the stupor just as swiftly as he had left. His glasses slowly slid down, encountering no resistance, until they perched impatiently on the end of his nose.
Facing the ceiling, Will looked down, past his nose, through the dirty lenses of his glasses to the computer monitor, scanning the screen for any possible stimuli.
Behind, his sister glided noiselessly past the door. Will noticed.
There was nothing to do. Absolutely nothing on this godforsaken planet that he could do without exerting himself further than he was comfortable with.
Fuck all.

Zilch.
Oh, Christ. Is this what he had wanted from his Summer Holidays? Will had looked forward to this long period of rest for so long, but there's only so much rest one person can manage before he starts to experience brain death.
The sun shone, the curtains were drawn, and melancholy engulfed Will's sanctuary.
He reached forward, and rested his hand on the mouse. He was taking far more time than he needed to. He paused for a moment of quiet reflection.

Internet.
Bookmarks.
Will > Blogger. That might do. That might pass the time. That might provide a momentary source of creative expression and self-satisfaction in what has been, all in all, a completely wasted day. Maybe, just maybe, adding to the blog will provide an excuse, a reason for this day to have ever existed.

Okay. Here we go. New Post. Right... What to call it, what to call it...
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Oh, I'll just put any old pap as the title. I can come back to that later.

William sat, in his melancholy sanctuary, brushed the lank locks of hair from his eyes,
and pondered.

THE END

Wednesday 15 July 2009

The 12th Street Rag

What a joyous little tune. I specifically picked this one because it had a nice, tinny, old-fashioned quality that I really like. Think of the end credits of 'Spongebob Squarepants' - it's that innocent, Hawaiian-sounding style that I find really addictive.

And lo, a new blog came into fruition

A chum o'mine, Josh Shaw, has followed my blogging example (did that sound rude to you?) and has created his own blog! It's still in the early stages, but I think it will be quite good.

And why does the spell-check function on Blogger try and correct words like Blogger and blog and blogging and blogger and frabjous and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? Most peculiar.

Well, I know when a blog post is losing its way. I'll end this now.

Tally ho.

Tuesday 14 July 2009

Bloody School! (Part Two)

Well, yes. Bloody school indeed. Today was the second of the two days I had to attend school during the holidays (there must be laws against that sort of thing - I may look it up), and as I had radically less things to do today, boredom reared its ugly head.

One thing that was bloody interesting was form time. No, wait, interesting is the wrong word altogether. No. Entertaining. Well, it was certainly a new experience. Different, if you catch my drift, as to say. For I have the Grand High Sultan of Bumbling, Mister Kevin Frimston, as my form tutor. Oh, what fun. And I say that with an unusual level of honesty. I like Mr Frimston, and expect him to be a lovable, terrible but generally entertaining tutor.
He arrived about fifteen minutes late, but we expected no less from a man such as he. He then proceeded to get nearly everyone's names wrong. Unfortunately, he didn't trip over the litter bin, something that I very much expected him to do. This lack of slapstick on Mr Frimston's part imbued me with a slight wistful melancholy that lasted all day. I wanted to see him fall.

The only real lesson I had today was English Language, taught by my English teacher from last year. Miss (or Ms) Adlam is one of the best teachers I know, and I was therefore thoroughly chuffed when I read my timetable yesterday and found that I would be having lessons with her in the future. Now, at the time, I didn't know that these induction days weren't an accurate depiction of who we would have for certain lessons and what not, but more of a way of getting to know the ropes and what have you. But my false sense of glee at the thought of Miss Adlam teaching me English Language was verified in the actual lesson, when she mentioned that it was most likely. So whoop-de-doo on that front. Fiddle-de-dee and so forth.

Besides from that jollity, I had a lovely free period between break-time and lunchtime, clocking my time spent slouching on a big leather sofa in the common room to a grand total of two wonderful hours. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, bliss.

Despite the large quantities of relaxation I got through today, I was still knackered; my body clock is still in Summer Holiday mode, and as a result I rarely got more than three and a half hours sleep prior to each of these two bizarre days. This didn't work for me today; most of the day (when I wasn't slouching, anticipating inevitable failure on the part of a notorious teacher or discussing alternative meanings to newspaper headlines) consisted of talks about 6th Form and what we are to expect and what there is to do. I am sorry to report that by period 4, I was involuntarily slipping into minor comas. Which is a terrible affliction when you are sat in the front row of the hall, with Mr Newbold (who looks a little bit like Jim Carrey half-way through his prosthetic transformation into Count Olaf) literally a couple of yards away. It was a small miracle that I wasn't caught.

What was really nice was that the debriefing, during the last period of the day, only lasted half an hour, and I was able to retire with my chums to the common room for twenty minutes or so before catching the bus home. Jolly pleasant. Puts a fellow in good spirits, you know.

Not much else happened. So I'm finished. You can leave now.

Monday 13 July 2009

Bloody School!

I had to go back to school today. The title 'Bloody School!' was what was going through my mind this morning, but the day got increasingly better and then, at the end, slightly worse. I have to be in today and tomorrow, to get to know the ropes about next year (6th Form), and then it's back to the devastatingly long Summer Holidays. This little (ha!) blog entry will attempt to entertainingly relay the events in the life of me, William Wivell, on Monday the Thirteenth of July on this year Two Thousand and Nine.

The first thing that happened was the bus; a necessary stage in every school day of my life, the bus being the only possible mode of transport to school for me at such an early hour. The fact that it was the first thing that happened also proves to be constantly invaluable, as it handily provides me with a school backdrop later, within which the later stages of this tale will be recounted.
But I digress. Horrendously. Sorry. Right, cutting to the chase, I love my bus trip to (and, indeed, from) school. It is so relaxing, because I am the first person to get on the bus in the mornings and it is nice to be able to sit in an empty bus, trundling through the early morning countryside. These bus trips always instil a sense of peace within me - a lovely way to start any day, I think you'll agree.
Whenever I sit on this bus, pottering about the outlying villages on a rickety old bus, searching for passengers like a great metallic bee hopping from suburban flower to suburban flower, I start to meditate. And during these moments of meditation, I often come up with some pretty profound observations and conclusions that I never make otherwise. I had one of these epiphanes as I was soaring past Dunholme this morning...
I noticed that the reason I am so calm, sedate and good-humoured at school is due to my non-aggressive start to the day. Whereas many people are driven to school, thrown into the hustle and bustle of school life at the gates at 8:00 before they know what's hit them, I am eased into it gently. About a quarter of an hour passes before the next person gets on the bus after me. And then, shortly after that, a few other people join the bus. Gradually, the people who make school what it is, my fellow students, surround me, until I am fully immersed in academic life and in the correct mindset to tackle another school day. It's like being gently lowered into a bath, instead of being dropped into it from a great height every day, which would no doubt trigger hostility in some people.

I feel that I must speed up the pace of this blog, if only temporarily, and skip ahead to the arrival at school. We started by getting our timetables for the following two days at the 6th Form common room. I didn't have any free periods today, but I have shedloads tomorrow, so that's nice.
We then listened to a slightly haphazard introduction to 6th Form by our new Head of Year, Mr 'Built Like a Brick Shithouse' Clark. He seems competent enough, albeit with a constant air of vague confusion. I'm going to miss Mrs Grant, our HoY for Year 11. She was always in control.
The day got off to a flying start (yes, I know, I have only just started talking about the lessons) with a jolly old art lesson. Bloody good, it was, despite the teacher's uncomfortable attempts to be pally with us. I then had a psychology lesson, which could have started better - we spent about twenty minutes in the wrong classroom, due to a room change that never reached the ears of the class. Furthermore, the new classroom was at the other end of the school, so we missed a hefty chunk of that lesson. Despite this, our psychology teacher (whose name escapes me) was a darn nice fellow who managed to cram a ton of fascinating info into our noggins in a radically compressed lesson. Kudos to him, I say. Bloody kudos.

Not much happened after that for a while - period four was an unusual 'session' which was exactly like a free period in every way imaginable, right down to the fact that it was set in the fantastically comfy and jolly old common room and absolutely no work was done. I think it was an opportunity for people to change their A-Level options, but that didn;t apply to me, so I just kicked back for an hour.

And then along came period five and the exacerbating Mr Frimston. God help me, I love Frimston - he seems to know his stuff, but at the same time never quite seems to know what's going on around him. Things rarely, if ever, work in his presence. Evidence of this was to be witnessed in our Art and Design: Photography lesson, where most of the computers wouldn't log on.
The frustrating thing about this session - especially for me - was that the original plan was to practise a process called 'pixillation' where a series of rapidly-captured photos are played back as an animation, giving the captured subjects a jumpy, manic sense of movement. This sounded like tremendous fun, and I was really looking forward to it. Unfortunately, of the six or so cameras Mr Frimston issued out to us, only about two managed to get working with the remaining working computers, leaving most of the class, including me, impatiently twiddling their thumbs. In the end, the lesson plan was revised, and we looked at sketchbooks of former students. This saved the lesson, and Mr Frimston's bacon, but nonetheless, I really wanted to animate someone spinning in a computer chair as we had been promised...
Combined with the fact that rain had been incorrectly predicted today, meaning that I had to lug a massive raincoat about, and the fact that I am having KFC in a couple of hours (hip hip, hooray!), today has been quite a mixed bag.

Tuesday should be interesting...

This is the end of this blog post. Go away.

Sunday 12 July 2009

Charlie Chaplin Bloopers

Saturday 11 July 2009

This is my favourite version of the Universal logo

King King King King

As my chanting, repetitive and slightly confusing title put it, I am now the Priory Academy LSST 2009 Prom King! And fellow blogger Emma Bowles is, quite deservedly, Prom Queen! It just shows - blogging improves you as a human being.
It was flattering - and slightly befuddling - to hear that Emma and I won by a landslide. People who didn't know me were voting for me, which gives me a lovely warm glow in my stomach, like the feeling of the first swig of Ovaltine or Horlicks or hot chocolate or whatever your hot drink of choice trickling down your oesophagus and into your digestive tract. Jolly nice.
Apparently, people liked my campaign e-mail I sent round the school, which I only did as a bit of a lark; I noticed that people were either sending out silly, mock campaign e-mails or taking a really embarrassing photo of someone and e-mailing it with a fake campaign slogan. Nobody was really taking it seriously, but far worse in my opinion was the fact that none of these people sent a genuinely funny e-mail. I decided to do a polite but humorous campaign e-mail, to see if that would trump the stupid e-mails. And apparently, it did. So hurrah.
I got a crown and everything! Jolly nice it was, albeit a bit on the small side. It wasn't until about half an hour before the end of the prom that I realised that the crown size was adjustable. It fit much more snugly after that, which made the whole experience nicer.
It has been but one hour since the prom ended, and already I am dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, blogging. As the prom ended at midnight, I may be awake for quite some time to come. I may not even bother going to bed.

Good morning.

Friday 10 July 2009

Prom Prom Prom Prom

As my chanting, repetitive and slightly confusing title put it, I have a prom coming up. Tonight, in fact. For those of you who don't know what a prom is, it is a big social event at the end of the last official year of school where all the boys and girls dress up as penguins and lampshades respectively, and then eat, and maybe dance. Should be a lark. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

It just occurred to me that most of the followers of this blog will actually be at the prom tonight. Oh, wait, there's Mister Mahon. Well, I'll post up a prom update either tonight or tomorrow especially for you, John.

'Cause I'm nice like that.

Over and out.

Monday 6 July 2009

SteveWatch #1

Due to my insomnia and increasing awareness of an inner evil, I have decided to dedicate some blog entries to logging the appearances and developing knowledge I have of my alter ego, 'Steve'.

Steve is my repressed dark side. For unknown reasons, my dark side developed a malevolent sentience, and every now and again, he emerges from his mental prison and has some fun, using my body as a vehicle of sorts. Now originally, Steve went by my name, and through the greatest of good fortune only took over my body at moments unlikely to capture the attention of others. As my mind entered a sleep-like state during these invasions, I often returned to my physical form with no recollection of what happened during Steve's 'visits'. As a result, I was oblivious to his existence, and casually assumed my blackouts to be a side-effect of my frequent migraines (to which I am now sure these manifestations are linked, but in a different way - more on that later). My suspicions were ignited when I discovered a crudely-drawn picture, signed William Wivell, in the pictures section of my Facebook profile. I didn't know what to think.

About a day after that, one month ago, 'Steve' manifested during an actual Facebook session. He astonished and frightened numerous online friends with his contributions, such as lewd comments, and even a webcam photo of himself (I was relieved to see that his appearance was identical to mine; the transitions were simply mental, and that was a comfort). All of this being on my profile, I was able to revisit these contributions later. These contributions were the first pieces of useful information I could gather about my very own Mr Hyde.

'Steve' took his name from a friend of mine, a Mister John P. Mahon of Lincoln, who, for reasons known only to himself, worships a god called Steve. In an exclamation of surprise upon encountering my alter ego on Facebook, Mr Mahon made a comment similar to 'Oh, God', but with 'God' replaced by 'Steve'. Assuming that Mr Mahon was addressing him, my alter ego adopted the moniker, and Steve has been his name ever since. Fortunately, his appearances have died down, along with my migraines.

I write this blog entry because I recently stumbled upon a Word document on my computer that shook me to the core. It was in my folder, under the ominous title 'StEVE'. Although I was pretty sure who wrote this, the random switching between capitals and single-case type, a trademark style of Steve, was the factor that convinced me and also terrified me. I was unsure what to make of it, so I opened the document. Would it be a letter to me? A warning?

It was a warning. And I'm scared now. Here it is...

But that's not all. As you can see from the vertical scroll bar to the right of the screen, this document goes on for quite some time...

Twenty-four pages, size 8 type, repeating the same child-like but undeniably evil message: I want to come out now.

This concerns me for a number of reasons, the first being that if Steve tries to escape his mental captivity again, my migraines may resume; you see, I have come to the conclusion that my migraines, which started shortly before the blackouts, are caused through trauma to my brain, caused by Steve trying to break out and take over my body. During his brief but prolific chain of manifestations recently, he had clearly developed a knack for manifesting himself, so less effort was required on his part, and my migraines subsided.
I had hoped that the recent lack of both migraines and Steve meant that I was finally free. But apparently, I was wrong. That Word document was new. Two days old when I found it, yesterday. It seems that, through sheer willpower, I had generated a strong mental barrier stopping Steve from returning. This appears to have annoyed him a bit, and he wants out.

But how long can I hold out to his growing rage?

And how the bloody hell did he manage to type on my computer during this time?

I'll post up more info when I find some. This has been SteveWatch #1.

Sunday 5 July 2009

Friday 3 July 2009

Well, if Stephen says so...

I was casually browsing the Internet, looking up the chief food of the flamingo (as you do), when I happened upon this mention of Stephen Fry on Wikipedia. Surrounded by solid facts, this 'matter-of-fact' sentence seems to postulate the theory that the powers-that-be (by this I mean the random bloke that decided to contribute to the article) consider the word of Stephen Fry, a notorious intellect, to be itself a perfectly valid argument against a documented fact. How flattering that must be for him.

I decided that in order to preserve the visual impact of said sentence, I would not annotate the following screenprint. By finding it yourselves, the humour and unusualness of it should be as great as it was when I first stumbled across it.

I love the fact that his name is not even linked to the corresponding 'Stephen Fry' Wikipedia article - whoever wrote it appears to think that everybody knows of Stephen Fry.

As a fan of Fry's popular comedy quiz QI, I know that the fact in question was originally questioned on that show. I'm not sure whether that particular factoid arguing against the feeding methods of zoo-keepers was a personal contribution by Stephen himself, or just supplied by the researchers, but if I was Mr Fry, I would be extremely proud, albeit a bit selfish, about taking all the pride for a theory about the artificial colouring of wading birds.

Wivell out.

Thursday 2 July 2009

I adore this tune.

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!