Dear Loughborough,

You are just the dumbest town I have ever met.

I'll admit, at first I thought you were being ironic. Then, I though you were being subtly ironic. Then, I thought you were very committed to your joke.

Then you told me that PDFs were unacceptable and that "real people" used .doc format.

Then I realised that this town is full of physiology students who drink and smoke heavily and drive the half-mile to McDonalds.

Then you had a gun-battle in a crowded night-club.

The furore surrounding Big Brother 8 conformed to the pattern I had begun to dread.

Today, you stole my bike. Now, it wasn't the most desirable bike, I know. When I bought it several months ago, I decided not to pay for a lock on the grounds that it would be more valuble than the bike itself. Thus, my bike has been casually propped on street corners and campus roads for the last nine months.

Today, I broke my bike in half. Literally, I "stepped on it" in order to accelerate up a hill, and snapped the rusty axle in two. A pedal hit the road with a mournful "clonk". Being the dutiful type, I pushed it the rest of the way to work and set about stacking shelves for hours.

Today is the day you chose to steal my bike: a bike that, very obviously, cannot be ridden.

Congratulations.

Your pal,
William of Occam

I am such a dork

A few days ago I was in a discussion where, as will happen, literary techniques came up. In particular, Chekhov's gun: If a rifle is hanging on the wall in the first act, it will be fired before the story concludes.

It was only last night that I realised that the Chekhov in question was probably Anton (as in Cherry Orchard) rather than Pavel (as in Nuclear Wessels).

Oh dear.

Aux armes, citoyens

I'm watching Casablanca, and it is all kinds of awesome.

However, even if... no, especially if I were French, I wouldn't want to sing La Maseillaise. Probabbly because of all that water-the-fields-with-blood stuff. The Internationale is better, though still a bit militaristic for my tastes¹.

Give me But For Honest Poverty any day.

---

Don't even get me started on the Battle Hymn of the Republic. That's a distillation of every kind of darkness in the human soul, right there.²
2. I wrote this comment shortly before discovering that is is "the unoffical anthem of the Republican Party".

EDIT: So it turns out also that the fore-runner for a distinctively English anthem, Jerusalem, might be referring to Oxbridge when it talks about "Dark Satanic Mills". Esau and Thomas I am, I am.

Two things

1) I know how you feel. I know just how you feel.

2) I miss "We have nothing to fear but fear itself".