Books I've actually finished lately: 121

I push the cause of the mullet because he is a low-class fish. He is simple. He is honest. He moves around in great formations or columns. He does damn near all the work. But he is also noble. He is like another noble thing I once loved, called 'soldier'.

- Col. Mike Malone

(This is, for better or worse, why there are no Brit warrior poets in the Iraqistan era.)

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 105

'Forking that guy's repo'

I think it's a very special sort of hell where you're compelled to explain to a journalist some terrible throwaway joke you made ten months earlier - and the journalist keeps saying, "I'm sorry, I still don't get it."

- Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

'Hashtag' oddness

Went, yesterday, to a screening of Frank which, unbeknownst to me, had the audio-impairment subtitles (which are, themselves, actually visually impairing; but no matter).

1) Frank, the character, an experimentalist musician/psychiatric patient, wears a big fibreglass head, and so has to narrate his real facial expressions so that folks have at least some sort of idea what he's feeling. This turns his utterances into kind of Twitter-speak: "I think that's a really great idea big enthusiastic grin", e.g.

2) Jon, the keyboardist/social media guru for the outfit, is forever updating his blog, posting messages to festival websites, or indeed Tweeting. But even though most of these ping up - in the correct format - on the big screen, whenever he is speaking-as-he-types the subtitles project the word 'hashtag', per se.

#itsthelittlethings

Fair warning

For copyright reasons, it's essential you make it clear you're following in the footsteps of James Bond and you aren't actually James Bond.

- agent for Fleming estate, to Jon Ronson