OK… an old post from the old version of Boreders, the promise of Summer in the not too distant future reminded me I had this lying around. What if Molly Sims and B&Q got together to really sell you that quality wheelbarrow?
I don’t know… but, now you can have a possible result on your desktop and muse on the possibilities whenever you like. I discovered Molly Sims through an associates Sports Illustrated
Charlotte Green had a fit of the giggles this morning on the 8am bulletin for the Today programme. Charlotte reported the news of an American researcher team who have discovered the earliest known still playable voice recording, which predates Edisons effort by 17 years. Recorded with a phonoautograph, which records sound on smoke blackened paper, the 10-second clip features a scratchy though audible rendition of ‘Au Clair de la Lune’. At the conclusion of the piece, listeners heard the clip played back, before Charlotte launched into an obituary piece for Richard Widmark. Moments into the obituary Charlotte started to stutter and stumble over her own fits of laughter, presumably highly amused by the mildly bizarre song. I’m sure nothing could be more embarrassing then ‘corpsing‘ during a serious news item, but sometimes you simply can’t help yourself. I know I’ve been set off my the smallest of things, then sat grinning and giggling until tears stream down my face and my jaw aches. Poor Charlotte.
Congratulations to Kellogg’s Cornflakes on their 111th birthday.
I love days like this, because they give me the opportunity to learn something new. I mean, I didn’t know that while John Kellogg created the cornflake, it was his brother, William, who added sugar to them and marketed them as a breakfast food. John and William fell out over it in the traditional American way - i.e. they got lawyers involved - and, thankfully, William won.
John intended his cornflakes to provide a healthy and rounded addition to the nutritional intake of those resident at his sanitarium. Today, we should probably think about breakfast in the same way - as the healthy foodstuff intended to inject bit of goodness into a day that could so easily go down hill.
Mind you, some of use like to mix our cereals - and I don’t think that would have gone down well with the good Doctor.
Sometimes I manage to finish reading a book (rather than meandering off on to something else half way through), and I should finish ‘Storm Front‘, the first of the Dresden Files, in the next day (exhaustion permitting).
I like Jim Butcher’s writing and I allowed my imagination to connect names with faces from the TV series (because, by and large, I liked the show). The premise and events were familiar - as this was the pilot show, though TV execs saw fit to schedule it in as the third episode instead. The book allows for a little more hardboiled detective narrative and supernatural encounters… I can’t recall whether the toad-faced demon or the fairy appeared on TV.
Harry Dresden, consultant on matters magical for the Chicago police department, has to solve a grisly murder commited with black magic. Alas, suspicion falls on Harry as his powers could easily stretch to the act and no other suspects are obvious. Morgan, an enforcer for the White Council of wizards, has Harry’s head in his sights for the crime - and the only out is to discover who really did it.
Recommended for those who tire of the ordinary murder mystery/detective series. A light, enjoyable read that kept me turning the pages - with just the right chapter length for my tired eyes just before bedtime. Nothing worse than a book with extremely long chapters or no segmentation at all… I like a natural break in my reading sessions.
Stockport County are my local team - and through some rough history the ownership of the team and the ground fell into the hands of a consortium and outside of the hands of the fans. In 2005, the fans managed to buy back the team - and now they need a lot of money to reacquire the ground. You can do your bit raising £1 million by buying pixels at groundforapound.com - as I’ve already done. I’m about an inch and a half from the top left corner, a little down from the edge… in a dark patch above the trees.
E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson made a difference to my childhood and adult life alike. Without the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and the surge of games that spawned around the role playing phenomena in the ensuing decades, I would never have led the double life I have. Yes, I would have still read fantasy books, but I might not have read them with such interest and enthusiasm.
Having read ‘Lord of the Rings’ (or part of it) in my pre-teens, I received a copy of the Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) game as a birthday gift. I had been playing occasional games of D&D in the practice rooms behind the main music room in my school for months and wanted to run my own game. One friend, Graham, ran D&D - where I had a fighter called Ironheart, while another friend, Jon, ran Call of Cthulhu and Star Trek - which generated Matt Houston, the grizzled private investigator, and Captain James Andrew Garth, commanding officer of the USS Lexington, respectively. When I finally ran MERP, I did so with the over-enthusiasm of an amateur gamemaster with a dodgy understanding of the setting, throwing the characters into a conflict with a group of Black Numenoreans just outside Bree. However, with time I found my footing and a firmer grip on the setting, resulting in adventures that spanned weeks, then months. At one point, we gamed for an entire summer almost non-stop, spending endless hours in the sweltering heat of a caravan in Graham’s parents’ driveway.
Those were exciting times, filled with constructs of imagination and youthful excitment, peppered with references to Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the adventures of Guybursh Threepwood that ground sessions to a halt in storms of laughter. In time, the real world crept in and sessions became ever more infrequent until they stopped altogether… but, my interest lingered on.
I played extensively at university, finding a splinter faction of the Role Playing Society that didn’t find character generation such an exciting nine week experience. I then dragged around my role playing collection from house to house, moving for convenience to get into work, wherever that might be. Occasional culls led to the destruction of the occasional magazine or the loss of a book to amnesiac borrowers, but otherwise my collection stayed intact and grew.
A few years back I stumbled on the rebirth of the PARANOIA role playing game and the open playtest that surrounded its creation. Allen Varney gathered a team of willing co-writers around him who have helped to generate a whole new line of books. Not only did I finally get my name into print inside the covers of a role playing manual, but I managed to beat out a supplement of my own - ‘The Underplex‘ - and fulfil some small dream. Now, I play a little with my own children, engaging their brains and voices in a way that Nintendo never will - throwing them in the face of challenges and danger without threat of harm, and seeing what they can make of it.
E. Gary Gygax (1938 - 2008) changed my life. In one way or another, without him (and Ironheart the fighter) I would be who I am today. I’d certainly have a lot more free shelf space… Gary - you willed me missed. Like that final climbing skill roll that killed my favourite Gnome rogue Golchak Grimface.
