Can anyone tell me whether this book, The History of Britain Revealed: The Shocking Truth About the English Language is a piss take or not?

I first saw it in WHSmiths a few months ago and had a flick through. It looks like total rubbish to me (the language we call “English” predates all other languages spoken here, including the one we call “Old English”) but possibly interesting rubbish. All the references I can find to it online take it seriously, even when pointing out the flaws in substance and style. But, look at the Amazon page and the quotes from - “proper”, not Amazon punters - reviewers, in particular:

‘The best re-writing of history since 1066 And All That.’

Fortean Times

So, clever spoof or serious kookery? And would I even be able to tell if I handed over some cash and read the damn thing?

[Update] - within hours of posting I received this e-mail (quoted with permission):

Hi-ho, Steve. I’m the author. If you have a look here you’ll be able to decide whether to go ahead or not.
http://www.applied-epistemology.org
Kind regards
Mick Harper

Very True Mood:  curious

I must post the conclusion of the City Link saga and an unexpected piece of good customer service from another company that happened soon afterwards, but for now it’s enough to know that I got my new computer and have been busy installing software.

First thing I installed was anti-virus (that’s a lie, first thing was Opera to make downloading all the other things less of a pain). But so far I haven’t installed a firewall, so I’m running with AVG Anti-Virus and Windows Firewall. I’d like a better firewall but I don’t know what to pick.

On my old laptop I’ve been using Kaspersky Anti-Hacker which is a bit old but reliable. This came as part of System Mechanic which I’ve found to be very handy. But, Iolo have produced a new version of System Mechanic and I get a spam pop up everytime I start it. I e-mailed them asking where I could a change log for the new version and they haven’t replied, but from the web site it looks like Kaspersky is no longer part of the package. I’m not sure whether to buy the latest Kaspersky product, or the latest version of System Mechanic, or both, or something else entirely. Any advice for a free or cheap firewall for a Windows XP machine?

I also have installed a BitTorrent client yet. The one built into Opera downloads much slower than the standalone ones I’ve used before. Which have mainly been Azureus, but that seems to have a memory leak in it somewhere ‘cos even when I shut it down completely the system is still clogged up until I reboot (or use System Mechanic to reclaim the RAM). I keep on hearing about μTorrent, is that any good? What’s your BitTorrent client of choice?

Finally, is there a site out there that could be described as LibraryThing for DVDs? I’ve found DVD Spot but it’s not really tickling my web 2.0 fabcy in the way that LT does. I could use Squirl, indeed I could use Squirl for just about any collection, but I’d like to see if there’s anything a bit more specialised first.

Very True Mood:  curious

Things that raised a smile this afternoon, which after spending two days out of the Easter weekend in the office are much needed -

1. The fact that Forbidden Planet have bookshelves labelled “Macho Men With Guns” full of books that feature, you guessed it. By the way, who reads that sort of book? People for whom Tom Clancy is too much of a liberal intellectual?

2. The fact that this book exists. As with several others in the series I wonder whether the word “is” was omitted from the title.

Very True Mood:  exhausted

Argh, Croydon was too full of children and chavs and chav children today. I bought a cheap pair of jeans, a cheap t-shirt, a Hellblazer spin-off graphic novel and one of the About Time volumes.

pink_weasel went into a yarn department and walked out empty handed.

Then round to the in-laws for silliness and thai food. Feeling well stuffed right now.

Oh, and let’s not talk about the rugby, okay?

Dear Lawrence Miles,

I’ve just read your latest blog post and eagerly await your Faction Paradox/Muppets crossover novel.

Very True Mood:  contemplative

I upgraded to Word Press 2.1 earlier in the week and it went fairly smoothly.

As is now customary I had to hack a few files because there is still no standard way of making the category and archive counts appear inside the links rather than after them. I also had to comment out a section of the new categories list function as I couldn’t get it to not include the default header to the list in addition to the header I was supplying.

And I’ve just realised that if I comment out the code that inserts a <ul> I should also find and comment out the code that inserts </ul> ‘cos right now all my pages are invalid.

I’ve also hacked the Now Reading plugin to link to LibraryThing rather than an internal library page. It makes more sense to only tag, rate and (sometimes) review books in one place rather than two. If only LT provided a feed based on its date started and date read fields I could probably do away with Now Reading altogether. I also haceked together a link to the book edit page directly from each sidebar entry. I hope you can’t see that. And I’ve just seen that this too is producing invalid XHTML. Sigh.

The Live+Press plugin controls has vanished from the write post page but everything important is still working behind the scenes. I just can’t set my Live Journal userpic, or the mood and music fields, any more. Quick test: is it still parsing lj tags like this one: very_true_thing ?

[Update] - Odd. The Live+Press options are present in the edit page, and whether a post gets cross posted or not seems to depend on whether I save a draft first or not. Curious.

On the bright side, I seem to be unaffacted by the PHP 5 fiasco that hit my host. And I’ve finally got around to enabling friendly permalinks, though I wonder whether http://www.stevepugh.net/VTT/2007/01/13/i-♥-the-taxman/ will work in older browsers.

Very True Mood:  curious

So, my attempt at the From The Stacks Winter Reading Challenge came close but just failed, I fell asleep last night with just twenty pages of my last book to go (I would like to assure people that the falling asleep was entirely down to a twelve hour day in the office and nothing to do with Tom Baker’ writing).

And I haven’t written any reviews yet either. But I’m off work most of next week so we’ll see what we get done.

Very True Mood:  tired

Well, a little bit moany, by comparison with some people[1] I’ve really got nothing to complain about, and what I have is largely self inflicted.

There ought to be a law against it.

I’m waiting for a furniture delivery. It’s coming sometime between 7 and 6 today. Getting dressed before 7 on a Saturday? When you have no plans to go further than the local shops[2] today? It’s just not right.

Seeing as I haven’t posted all week…

Happy New Year

I have foolishly gone and made a bunch of resolutions, and told people what they are (so I can’t conveniently forget all about them), so I might as well post them here:

1. Give up alcohol for seven weeks. An odd length of time, but it means I can start drinking again just in time for Lettice’s 30th.
2. Give up soft drinks, sweets and crisps. Yikes! All in one go.
3. If I buy breakfast on the way to work then I must buy a cheap lunch. Kind of vague this one, but I know what I mean.
4. Pay at least £100 into my savings account every month. Standing order now set up to transfer the money the day after I get paid, so I don’t need to do anything else for this one.
5. Limit my wargames/role playing games spending. I did a little experiment a while back and the results were a bit scary. I’m aiming for a lower figure this year - £500 total, so I have a limit of £100 per quarter and an extra floating £100 for magazine subscriptions and similar costs.
6. Get a hair cut at least every two months. Lettice may want me to go for “the full Tom Baker” but there were some very frightening photos of me taken at the Christmas party and I think short is better.

Five days into the year and I haven’t broken any of them. Though the fact that alcohol free lager tastes even more revolting than regular lager and that alcohol free bitter doesn’t seem to exist, may be my undoing.

[1] Lawrence Miles has dumped his diary/blog for November and December online in one big splurge. It’s not easy reading. This guy is one of the most talented writers to ever touch Doctor Who but he’s got some serious issues - I really don’t want to say anything trite like “tortured genius” because that turns a person into a cliché.

[2] More importantly to the Farmer’s Market - West Norwood is moving up in the world!

Quick post before I dash off the work Christmas party.

Today there’s a blogathon marking the tenth anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan.

My parents had the large colourful hadcover of Cosmos and it was one of those books that I was always taking off the shelf and reading, understanding more and more of it as I got older. Probably one of the formative influences that led me to read physics at university. Very simply, he was one of the greatest communicators and popularizer of science that there has ever been.

The 50 most significant SF/F novels from 1953-2002 according to the Science Fiction Book Club.

( random edits )

Bold the ones you’ve read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien [1]
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert *
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin *
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett *
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams *
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny [2]
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson * [3]
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

[1] The first two parts of the trilogy were published in ‘51 and ‘52 so including this in the specified time period is a bit of a cheat.

[2] I think I’ve read this but I’m not sure. I’ve, many, many years ago, read something with what seems to be the same plot but it didn’t seem in any way special enough to warrant the reputation this book has.

[3] Except for the Harry Potter, is this the most recent book on the list? That makes the last decade and a half rather under represented.