Gary Turner wrote seven posts today. Not that I'm feeling competitive, because who can compete with Gary?, but you know, one extra post here won't hurt, will it?
You know what I love about Professor Colin Pillinger, the man behind the Beagle 2 mission to Mars? Here he is, sending incredibly complicated and expensive technological marvels into space and, where you might expect to see a slick and polished Oxbridge professor, what you actually get is this big cuddly-looking bloke with the best […]
From my friends at Zoe: See no weevil. Hear no weevil. Eat no weevil. Take care, lest ye be branded part of the Axis of Weevil! My next screenplay: a story of good beetles vs bad beetles entitled A Touch of Weevil.
Neil's in London now, and about to embark on a short signing tour. Sadly, he's not coming to Bournemouth, I'm too skint to be able to afford the train to go see him in London or Bath, and his visit to Leeds totally fails to coincide with my visit to Leeds. Oxford, Bristol and Dublin […]
Last weekend I decided that if I was going to try to write for the broadsheets, it would probably do me good to actually read them once in a while. So, in a fit of enthusiasm, I went out and bought all the Friday, Saturday and Sunday broadsheets. That is one hefty heap of papers, […]
I'm not sure I have lurgey. Mum thinks I do because I look pale. I counter with the fact that I always look pale. I am the embodiment of pale, even when fully tanned. I do still ache and have a fuzzy head, and I really don't feel like doing much at all today (do […]
I ache. My head aches, my neck aches, my back aches, my arms and ribs ache. My shoulders ache. This morning, when it was just my neck and head, I had thought I'd put my back out again, which I am prone to doing. I was a little annoyed because only Monday I'd been to […]
My first ever guest blogger is Bram Janssen, a Welsh learning, Dutch teaching mate of mine from The Netherlands. We first met several years ago in an online community called Gorpies, and will meet face-to-face for the first time in February when we're going to a Jerry Goldsmith anniversary concert in London. Bram emailed me […]
About three months ago I read a short script on Zoetrope.com by a guy called Vincent. I was sitting at the dining room table downstairs on a weekend trip home from Reading and as I read the script I giggled and snarfed and guffawed like a maniac. Vince wanted to cut the script by nearly […]
This time last year my sister-in-law was made redundant, with a finish date of 31 December. This year, it's my brother's turn, with the same date. What a low down dirty rotten trick to make people redundant just after Christmas. It's the most expensive time of the year, the worst possible time for job hunting […]
I was surprised to notice from my stats that a Google on the phrase photos of what my stump will look like after amputation brings up this blog on the third page of the search results. I guess that post regarding the dream I had about losing a hand was the culprit. Out of curiosity, […]
Every month I reset my Blog-City referrer log – it only shows the top couple of dozen referrers, so once you get a week or so in there’s not much change at the top and even less change at the bottom. Within the referrer urls, it’s always interesting to see which search terms people have […]
Of course, when NTL took my email, they took my web space with it, damn them. I can't remember what I had hosted there, so I'm going to have to just hope it all eventually comes to light. I know some of the pics on the blog are currently missing, so I'm just in the […]
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Matt is fascinated by the story of Argleton, the unreal town that appeared on GeoMaps but which doesn’t actually exist. When he and his friend and flatmate Charlie are standing at the exact longitude and latitude that defines Argleton, Matt sets in motion a chain of events that will take him places he didn’t know existed… and which perhaps don’t.
From the identification of the Horsehead Nebula to the creation of the computer program, from the development of in vitro fertilisation to the detection of pulsars, A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention brings together inspiring stories of how we achieved some of the most important breakthroughs in science and technology.
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Every year, on May Day, a young woman is stolen away by the faeries to become their Queen for a year. This year, though, the faeries have bitten off more than they can chew. Shakti Nayar will do whatever it takes to get her own life as a botanist back. As she struggles to work out how to get home, she uncovers Faerie’s dark secret and finds that she is not the only human who needs saving.
All the threads looked the same to the innocent eye, but Maude could see the black heart running up through one strand as it wove its way through the lace roundel. She busied herself with tidying her bobbins as a customer browsed the lace mats on her stall.
“I’ll take this one,” the woman said, holding up a square piece, twelve inches across. Maude winced, picked up the piece she had just completed and held it out to the woman for her consideration.