Putting on a beret and feeling obliged to say, “Ohh, Betty”

Je suis completement knackeré.

Garden of Earthly Delights

I do not believe (of course, I do not believe) that all of us died during the pandemic and now we are all of us actually in hell, no, I do not believe that (of course, I do not believe that), and yet it would certainly explain where we find ourselves.

As I discovered the hard way about 5 years ago, most British publishers don’t consider novellas for publication. However, they don’t say so in their Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook listings; writers are supposed to know it without being told, possibly by osmosis.

I can only assume that Graham Greene himself wrote this for the back cover of his novel “The Comedians“, as I can’t imagine anyone else having the nerve to write such an unhelpful, counterproductive blurb.

Whoops Apocalypse (the TV series).

I’ve never come across this immensely stylish WW2 information poster before. It looks almost like a frame from ‘The Third Man’.

One of those times when reading Wodehouse is of genuine assistance Wordle 1,662 4/6* ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

This is a brilliant example of how funny synchronized movement can be. #Comedy #Animation #LooneyTunes

My efforts to make “Oh Jessop, will you never learn” a viral meme meet with continued resistance

Aries: Live, laugh, lower your expectations.

Jessop meme activated

"There seems to be something jamming my guidance systems," explained the computer brightly, "impact minus forty-five seconds. Please call me Eddie if it will help you to relax."

No, Ve Vouldn’t Gonto Do It from Knickerbocker Holiday by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson youtu.be/caOe_wo5p7o

A lot of people are angry and contemptuous of those politicians who call themselves moderates, and I can understand why. Many “moderates“ seem to have forgotten the point, which is to provide an alternative to extremism; to oppose it, to the utmost of their power.

He runs his presidency like a Kaufman and Ryskind satire, but without the benefit of Gershwin’s music.

An AI chatbot does not have PERSONHOOD. It has no agency. It cannot meaningfully apologise. It cannot speak on behalf of another. It cannot speak for itself; it has no self. Stop asking it for quotes for articles. Stop printing its quotes.

We’ve been re-watching the first 3 series of “Sherlock”. They really are as much a period piece as the original stories now, but at their best they are brilliant, in all senses.

In this Year of Reading, a gentle reminder: The best way to get your kids reading is to let them see *you* reading. The way to *stop* your kids reading is to criticize their choices, or to make reading a competition, or a punishment, or a race, or a learning tool. Let it be fun. Let them read.

Media is starting to report the Grok child porn story but way too many are centering the bot's "apologies" and "admissions" without explaining that these are being generated in response to user requests and are not in anyway authentic or meaningful.

A fairly infernal quiz question for the Gilbert and Sullivan fans: In what sense is HMS Pinafore the first and Ruddigore the last?

One of the myths perpetuated by Shaffer, and this new adaptation, is that Mozart never crossed anything out. He did, and he restructured sections eg using symbols to denote repeats. In K491 he ended up drawing faces instead of asterisks (zoom in). I was so happy to get to see this score at the RCM ❤️

‘Cancel’ comes from a Latin word meaning “to make like a lattice.” When people needed to annul or void a document, they sometimes would mark it with crosshatches XXXXX which resembled a lattice. So the document became ‘canceled.’ ...we hope this post doesn’t get us that.

Man Spends Whole Day Dreading Fun Activity He Signed Up For https://theonion.com/man-spends-whole-day-dreading-fun-activity-he-signed-up-1819579571/

The thing is, I left X when the owner started making Nazi salutes, and even that felt as if it was slightly later than the ideal time to do it…

Joe Orton and his boyfriend – later murderer – Kenneth Halliwell, took library books and returned them with comedy collages on the dustjackets. The pair would sneak the book back on to a shelf and then wait for someone to pick it up so they could watch the reaction.

Ah, well

Morning quiz: supposing I have just shouted at the radio, "No, he didn't! He was joking, for god's sake, he wasn't being serious!", what had they said?

No mention of Bizet, who contributed the only bearable thing (the tunes) to this whole farrago

It's just occurred to me this moment that "Phooey" is just the French "Pfui", spelt differently.

I always associate the word "tardy" with Cloris Leachman in "High Anxiety" saying, "Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup."

Disappointing to see the Wodehouse Society using this obviously AI-generated image on their website. Also unclear how Hercule Poirot sneaked in

The phrase"Trump says" has the opposite function to "Simon says", in that anything that follows it can safely be ignored.

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 867: Don't make your writing all about you. Leave some space for your readers to also make it about themselves.

There are as many ways to write as there are writers. Anyone who has read my books will know my style is on the laconic side, but I love to read elaborate or discursive writing as much as the terse sort: Chandler as much as Hammett. What is important is that the writer is in tune with themselves.

Love is Sweeping the Country (Ah, we can dream...) youtu.be/wKDEJoW8sKU?...

Merrilymost greety, and deep joy to everybole this Chrimblode. Oh yes.

Okay, that's quite enough about the slaughter of the innocents, it's Christmas

It sometimes surprises me how much connotation there is in what people say. Sometimes, the real meaning is not even the opposite of the meaning of the words, an easy enough code to crack, but something quite different which you can only guess by knowing in advance what they are trying to say.

Still quite proud of my Wuthering Heights gags from a couple of months ago

"We run a tight ship here but a happy one, eh, Morse?"

There's only one piece of writing advice that's universal. "Read as much as you can." All the rest is potentially terrible, depending on who it's being given to. You just have to figure it out, through experimentation, which means finding out some advice is terrible for you.

I need a holiday. Oh... that's lucky

Palate cleanser

A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. —Oscar Wilde

As far as I'm aware (I'm open to correction), most of the "Great American Songbook" composers didn't write Christmas songs: Gershwin, Porter, Kern, etc. Maybe they just looked at Irving Berlin's "White Christmas", shrugged, and said, "I'm not competing with that."

Christmas Ident Calendar Day 24. Wallace and Gromit crossed to BBC1 in 2008 for 'A Matter Of Loaf and Death' and were given the Christmas ident that year. It turned out to be the biggest programme of Christmas and the year with 16.15m!

Apologies for yesterday's slight brainstorm about "killing your darlings", which expressed what I think, but probably more forthrightly than politely. I'll just add this & shut up: if all art is a balance between Apollo and Dionysus as Joe Orton* suggested, it is in our darlings that Dionysus lies.