NB - 'cissexism'

Apparently a 'cis' is someone who identifies with the same gender that they were born with. So that's a thing now.

- Tim Stanley, in The Telegraph

Myleene Klass 'wipes the floor' with Ed Miliband

In which I initially thought The Telegraph had used inverted commas to denote that Ms Klass did not, in fact, actually use the would-be leader of the country to mop out her kitchen.

Alas (twice over)...

Mini biog

(from this month's Literary Review)

Also

'An Ode to Photocopies', by Nick Ripatrazone.

No.2 is a poem unto itself.

And also (again):

The role of the high school English teacher is also not to create a legion of English majors — God help us — but rather to pause a student’s hectic and harried day and get them thinking about words.

John Updike

was rejected, twice, from Harvard's most prestigious creative writing class.

And other matters.

'The three war cemeteries...'

Is it a 'thing', then, in commemorative inscriptions (and/or elsewhere) that you can put a comma between words written in the lower case, but not if they're in capital letters?

Or does one of those two (?) places contain two (or indeed even three) war cemeteries within it?

(One might argue, in the circumstances, that the comma before 'saith the LORD' is one of the more superfluous punctuation marks in the English language.)

Which realisation (#tag)

['Hashtag' oddness - part 3] has now served to completely ruin this otherwise extremely funny Late Night with Jimmy Fallon sketch that up until about five minutes ago I used to venerate.

Such is life.

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.

Books I've actually finished lately: 58

Tis the season to be X44

Books I've actually finished lately: 57

Books I've actually finished lately: 56

Books I've actually finished lately: 55

With thanks to Tpr Newman, who gave me the paperback in Afghanistan in an attempt to reduce the weight of his home-bound luggage.

(I read it in Sri Lanka.)

Books I've actually finished lately: 54