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

Market forces

Smyth's Sayings

Check your selfie before you wreck your selfie.

The terrible truth about social media

There's a particu'ly dark place in my heart

for wise-ass spelling-and/or-grammar-type jokes

that have mistakes in them.

[UPDATE: Hereafter, 'The Nth Circle'.]

I am indebted to Google Translate

for the information - happened upon mid-translation of a 'German' poem - that the adjective 'englisch' means, among other things, 'angelic' (obv.) and 'medium-rare' (less obv.), and the proper noun 'die Engländer' can be 'monkey wrench'.

'Chiefly British'

(Definition also new to me.)

InDefinition - 74

e-quaintance, n. person you only know through e-mail/social media activity

Favourite footnotes: 6

Editor's Note: As of August 14, 2006, we are no longer accepting sestina submissions.

- Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency

Fair dos to Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg has started a book club, and the publishers are running out of nominated books already.

Oh, I have *totally* arrived...!

Can there be any job lower

- and, to be clear, I do mean morally - than being the wankstain who editorialises totally self-explanatory 'humour' memes for the internet's retarded readership?

"Disrespected and dicked around"*

The staff of The New Republic quits out of solidarity with their former editors.

Good lads, themselves. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, this is what a sense of honour looks like. And, most probably, what it costs to keep it.

(That said, as I recall, the king in 'The Red Wedding' did not 'stab everyone in person'. Or indeed anyone. In fact I don't remember him even being there. But the affair does very much resemble the new-media-buyout plot currently unfolding in The Newsroom. So props to Aaron Sorkin for having his finger on the cultural-political pulse, as usual.)

--
* She's paraphrasing.

(Ironical) Word of the Day

from Dictionary.com:

nosophobia, n. Medical students’ disease, meaning “fear of disease”.

Oh, and another thing (#tag)

['Hashtag' oddness - part 2]

This thing here - # - is not a 'hashtag'. It's a 'hash' (as they used to tell you on the more complicated kinds of phone-calls), also known as the 'pound sign', 'number sign', and even, apparently, the 'octothorpe'.*

A hashtag is the hash sign followed by the cutesy commentary. #likeitsaysinthisOEDdefinitionrighthere

See?

--
* which makes perfect sense, but this is the first I've heard of it.

Just how much should I let it annoy me

that in this pathetically simple advert someone couldn't even be bothered to format the '.co.uk' into the same font as the 'WH Smith'?

Answers on a postcard - addressed to my psychiatrist.

Things one is not typically asked

while trying to download a free PDF:

[Author's note: see following post.]

Although a bit gutted

that, thanks to an old schoolfriend's click-baity Facebook activities, I was compelled to go and look up the word 'emacity', I confess I did feel somewhat better when I read '3 matching dictionaries'...

[problem caused by Nathalie Gwilliam]

Thing there should be on the internet:

James Joyce-type random obscenity generator.*

--
* Idea going for 15% cut of all profits.

Jackpot

Free access to Siegfried Sassoon's war notebooks, courtesy of the University of Cambridge.