Thursday January 26, 2006; part of:
Blather
So more random social notes.
- Newspapers scouring the country for a woman who'll admit to sleeping with Simon Hughes. Probably gone into hiding alongside Anne Atkins' gay friends.
- To the Telegraph's Scientists meet the media bash last night, dressed for the occasion in a suit and tie. Meet on the stairs a contributor to this comment section who is with a pretty young woman who looks thoughtful and amused, rather than enraptured, to be in the company of two such distinguished old farts. Our conversation goes something like this:
Commentator: "Ah - Andrew. Loved the Caitlin piece."
Pretty Young Woman: "What was that about?"
C: "Blow jobs!"
Discussion becomes general and rather confused.
PYW: "And how did you know about it?"
C: "I read it on his blog."
I become aware that I have just been, in effect, introduced to a complete stranger, someone with whom, under other circumstances, I might have enjoyed some conversation, as a man who keeps a blog about blow jobs. No wonder George Carey won't sign the comments he makes here.
- Not one person I talked to at the party had a good word for Richard Dawkins' TV series. The most vigorous denunciations all came from atheist scientists. I was a little surprised, since one of them had been very close to him.
- Sue Blackmore's hair has gone quite white -- and green, and red, with only a few yellow streaks left.
- Richard Harries signs his emails "+ Richard".
At this, the doorbell rings, preserving you all from further excitement.
Posted by andrewb at January 26, 2006 07:37 AM
A conversation, last week:
Person X: "I'm a bit worried about Andrew Brown"
Rupert: "Why?"
X:"He seems obsessed with blowjobs..."
R:"Uh..."
X:"...and teenage girls. He's too smart to fall for that moral panic nonsense. What's going on?"
R:"Well, uh, you know, men of a certain age, um, lost youth, er, couldn't claim complete disinterest myself, erm, nothing human is alien to me as that Greek chap said, ehm, daughter, big wide world, perfectly reasonable concerns, ah..."
X:"But you don't write about it at length, repeatedly, on your blog"
R:"I don't have a blog"
X:"You may want to keep it that way"
Textile formatting works here. Double hyphens are automatically converted to en dashes, quotes are automatically smartened. You can put dashes and asterisks around text to make
italics bold and other silly effects easily.
- Text wrapped in Asterisks which * will be bold. The asterisks must touch each end of the bold text. There must a space before the first and after the last.
- Text wrapped in underscores - _ - will be italicised. The underscores must touch each end of the italics. There must a space before the first and after the last.
- Paragraphs starting bq. will be block quoted. There must be no space before the "b" and one space after the full stop.
- A hyperlink is made by wrapping the link text in double quotes, followed immediately by a colon, then the URL. If there is a question mark in the URL, wrap the whole lot in square brackets.
- I use two classes to mark up text that deserves it. sane text looks like this. loony text looks like that. The syntax for those is %(sane)[space] sane text %; loony is left as an exercise to the reader.