#BadSex

His mind... will never be able to think of an ear in the same way again.

- Hunting for Dirty Books, an entertaining short film from the team behind the Bad Sex Award.

Books I've actually finished lately: 3

NB Ian Sansom is additionally co-author/-editor of The Enthustiast Field Guide to Poetry, an inexplicably un-famous volume that absolutely no home (or English teacher's classroom) should be without.

Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 10

borborygmus - (Greek) the sound of intestinal gases rumbling

[with thanks to Moose Allain, cartoonist at the Literary Review]

InDefinition - 61

surplice to requirements, adj./n. chorister between jobs.

Who guards the (delicate intellectual integrity of the) guards?

In which the FBI decide they need to keep closer tabs on the potential Communistical philosophies of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre... before discovering that what they really need to do first is to learn French.

Keystroke twins - 19

peers
peeps

Books I've actually finished lately: 2

Warning: contains recipes for salad dressing and an 'African dry' martini.

Got watalappam/n?

Nifty Sri Lankan advert/plea for national unity. Nice T-shirt, too, by the looks of it.

Because I HAD often wondered...

Up to the Civil War “the United States” was invariably a plural noun: “The United States are a free country.” After Gettysburg it became a singular: “The United States is a free country.” This was a result of the whole mode of thinking that Lincoln expressed in his acts as well as his words, making union not a mystical hope but a constitutional reality.

- Gary Wills, via Andrew Sullivan

So what?

Two words, guaranteed to repel any manner of mediocrity masquerading as conventional wisdom.

- Dracula (according to Sky Living)

Public Service Announcement

There's an advert out and about at the moment encouraging you to switch your e-mail wossnames over to Microsoft, because Outlook - unlike those corporate monsters at Google/Gmail - won't go through your correspondence and milk every second word for targeted marketing data.

I'm on Outlook [herefore known by the entire world as 'Hotmail', but whatever], and a little over half an hour ago I sent a mail to a friend in South Africa discussing my holiday plans for Christmas in Sri Lanka and his mother's well-being in Cape Town. I now have an e-mail - in my Junk folder, admittedly/amusingly - from an unknown South African travel agent, urgently inviting me to experience the wondrousness of Cape Town this December.

From which we learn:

1) that Outlook almost certainly are reading your e-mails; but
2) they're just not very good at it - otherwise they'd have noticed:

• that I've already booked my Christmas holiday,
• that I will clearly not be spending the festive season in South Africa, and
• that the bulk of our correspondence was taken up with the fact that Denis's mum's place in Cape Town has recently been violently burgled.

How not to do small-talk

HOUSE: Dr Gregory House. I don't think we've met.
CONWAY: Dr Jamie Conway. I've heard your name.
HOUSE: Most people have. It's also a noun.

- House

Old sayings

You know, there's an old saying: 'Sometimes monkeys die.'
It's not a great saying, but...

- Friends

Seamus Heaney's final words

were by text message. (Snobs and lit.-type ponces take note.)

I'd like to think that they'll appear in his Collected Works.

Books I've actually finished lately: 1

Race relations (humour (is tricky to transcribe))

D'you spell 'homy' with a Y? I wanna be respectful...

- House