I also enjoyed for once being in a cinema that fell into complete silence as the film began. And the hearty laugh of the guy in the front row. he made me think of that line in Woody Allen’s philosophy:

‘What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream? Or what’s worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?’

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But I thought I should log that I just witnessed a crow attacking a heron in Regent’s Park. I was coming up to the gates where my route from town joins the inner circle, heard a squawking and screeching and looked up to see a very strange outline in the sky. It was a heron with wings and legs spread out randomly dropping towards me as if coming in to land. It righted itself and arrowed over my head pursued by an angry crow.

Earlier this year I heard woodpecker-like sounds two days in a row on my way to get the paper and decided to keep my eyes open on the way home. A spotted woodpecker was sitting on a tv aerial pecking away at it. Apoa saw it the next day so it obviously spent a few days there expressing itself.

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This looks good, even though their website doesn’t work properly on my safari.

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Another cultural highlight this week was a screening of Once at the NFT. It’s a great film and was followed by a Q&A and then a live music performance from the two lead actors (‘musicians who can half act’ rather than ‘actors who can half sing or play music’ as they described themselves). It’s a great movie. Hope everyone else realises.

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I’m a big fan of Brakes ever since I saw them supporting Belle and Sebastian and then started receiving their emails. They’re always playing gigs in people’s living rooms and things. I’ve never won one of those competitions but I did get an email last week about a secret gig at the Water Rats. They came on stage at 7.30 and there were around 20 of us in the room at the time. They played a fantastic short set and revealed that ‘Heard About Your Band’ is about Dominic Masters from The Others (hope they didn’t think that was only OK if it was in front of the 20 of us - well, it crept up to about 50 by the end). Almost as good as a living-room gig. The volume was up to the level for a bigger gig, though, and my ears are still buzzing. It’s going to be a bore when the hearing properly falls apart.

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‘AND THERE’S NO OFFLINE MODE!!!! A SmartPhone that insists you have a SIM card in at all times? Just bugger off Sony Ericsson, you’ve lost my respect. You’ve had thousands of pounds out of me in the past. But stick to student mobile phones called Kxxx with crap silly little jukeboxes on them, SmartPhones are out of your league. If you’re going to use UIQ, then take a leaf out of Motorola’s book and apply it (in a newer version, Symbian 9.2, UIQ 3.1) to a teen phone, like the excellent new Z8. Either that or do the real design work and make a proper SmartPhone, not this insulting halfway house. As it stands, the P990i is a better phone that this P1i - it has all the same faults, but at least its double action transformer style flip makes it more usable.’

would be Stephen Fry aka the omnigenius who wrote the book I’m enjoying right now:

Stephen Fry - The Ode Less Travelled

which, by the way, is an excellent introduction to poetry (hate the title, though ;-)

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We’ve been taking in a lot of culture recently, since I went through a phase of grabbing those cheap or 10 squid special offers, but Apoa and I think this might be the most exciting cultural event we’ve come across recently.

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All the linguists I spoke to were early adopters and big fans of Jamie Oliver when he first started off as a young lad zipping around London on his scooter picking up ingredients and drumming with his mates. He’s still got the ability to come up with recipes that look simple, turn out to actually be simple and taste good when you’ve made them. We’ve just started a routine where the kids cook one evening meal each every week and Apoa is starting off by referring to the first Naked Chef book

Last night we had her own adaptation of ‘Pappardelle with mixed wild mushrooms’ It was, indeed, delicious.

We’re impressed by her creative and artistic approach. Her first thought was to ask us if we could pick up any enoki mushrooms and she’s had us out sourcing ingredients for the past few days.

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‘Academics love a dull read’ according to Jonathan Wolff. I totally agree with him but would point out that Kurt Vonnegut recommends the following for short story writers:

‘Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.’

Wolff’s main point is that good writing involves keeping the reader in suspenders while academics encourage the opposite:

‘At least in my subject, we teach students to go sub-zero on the tension scale: to give the game away right from the start. A detective novel written by a good philosophy student would begin: ‘In this novel I shall show that the butler did it.’ The rest will be just filling in the details.’

I’ve often advised students to follow Vonnegut’s advice on the tension question. His other rules are worth a look too. You can find them here:

American State - Kurt Vonnegut’s rules for writing fiction

And here’s the book where you’ll find them:

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I just got back from a really fun week teaching a residential course on linguistics to A level students. The course was called ‘The Language Detective’ and themed around the idea that linguists are investigators, looking for clues, etc. This is me and Graeme with the magnifying glasses the students gave us at the end of the week. I’ll be uploading presentations soon and writing a report. One of the best things about the course was that no-one ever had to rush off anywhere so there was time to carry on talking through interesting and tricky topics.

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Just saw this nice bit of syntactic ambiguity from Wittgenstein on quotes of the day

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Met Tim in the pub and lent him the excellent the damned utd which he hadn’t read yet. He revealed to me he was living next door to Brian Clough when he was winning the league with Derby and stuff. Don’t think he features in the book, though.

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Tags: alex james, alexjames, blur