moosifer jones’s lair & grouch - online home & blog of Mags L Halliday

Exeter Goes Pop! again at Tigga’s this coming Thursday night (11 Sept) and every second Thursday of the month until Christmas. It’s free, the bar is good value, the ExPoppers get to play music without the venue manager telling them to turn it down, and there’s now a dancefloor. The first night at Tigga’s was good, but I forgot to take any photos.

If you’re thinking “but what is ‘wonk folk’?” then you can take a listen to the sort of music Alistair plays tomorrow on phonic fm (106.8FM in the city, or streaming online) from 4pm till 6pm. Or you can take a listen to the mixtapes he posts to unpopular. I’m not sure what ‘wonk folk’ is either, BTW.

(Terry, who has been DJing the excellent Collisions at Timepiece forEVAH, also does a slot on phonic.fm)

In all things Wordpress, I bow to Allyn Gibson. If my own ability to put a site’s design together falls over, I will whimper at him until he helps out. So, given his posts about the joys of upgrading wp, I naturally approached my first live upgrade with some trepidation. It took less than five minutes. So that’s another time-wasting plan foiled. Only a few days left till I submit the novella, so I need some rocket fuel today.

I’m thinking about writing a review of Lost in Austen for shiny shelf, but I suspect my current editor - who also writes for t’shelf - might spot that. My emailed rant, the morning after, runs something like:

Someone suggested that watching Lost in Austen on ITV1 was a Bridget Jonesy thing that would count as research. It was not and does not. It takes the amusing conceit of The Eyre Affair and stamps on it until it becomes that Austen spoof episode of Red Dwarf but with less jokes. It demonstrates the depths Alex Kingston’s career has reached. It doesn’t cut back to Lizzie Bennent on a binge-drinking session whilst watched a DVD of Colin Firth. And it has a Darcy about whom the only comment [big magpie] could produce was “he needs to brush his hair”.

Sorry, I can’t believe I wasted an hour on such drivel and I’d like to vent. The best thing about it was the advert for Paignton Zoo in the middle.

Naturally, any actual review will be more measured, and point out that, actually, Alex Kingston does a good job on playing this revisionist version of Mrs Bennett, and that Hugh Bonneville was a very good Mr Bennett. It might mention Lost in Austen not only in the context of The Eyre Affair but also the long tradition of Pride and Prejudice professional fanfic such as Pemberley or Pride and Promiscuity.  None the less, the tv series is lazy and presumes the central conceit will carry the viewer over the lack of convincing dialogue or original characters. Unlike Sam in Life on Mars (a series Lost in Austen is drawing much comparison to), there is zero empathy towards the contemporary character stranded in this strange world.

*I’m not the only one to think a comedy of errors in the style of the early Coen brothers and called Lost in Austin would be better, right?

Sébastian’s new kill count ticked over to a new landmark:

• Rodents:
  Rats - 2
  Mice - 40 42
  Voles - 11
• Birds:
  Sparrows - 5
  Dunnocks - 1
  Robin - 1
  Ringed pigeon - 3
  Uncertain - 9
• Other:
  Frogs - 1
  Unidentifiable remains - 3

He has now killed 42 mice. I feel there is a Douglas Adams’ joke lurking there, given that it’s the mice who really run the Earth.

I was looking through wikipedia (the virtual equivilent of borrowing your mate’s English O-level notes and hoping they’ll see you through the exam) for the correct lyrics of a Monty Python song when I found this:

I wonder where they’ll find one of them…

After the initial overload of self-testing skewed the data, my google analytics has settled down. And what do we notice? Firefox is winning. Even if you allow for my own viewing of the pages.

Of course, I don’t have FF3 yet so I’ve no idea if it’s terrible or a step progression. I designed this site for FF2, with browser testing under Opera, Safari and IE. Guess which browser is the only one on which the design shows any flaws?

Yep, IE is FAIL.

I have successfully reorganised my video shelves and sorted my infamous to be read pile.  That was a fun two hours spent dodging actual writing this weekend.

The to be read pile shed about four books, and gained a nifty new shelf for “you’ve started so you must finish” books. The shelf - current contents around 8 - was my very original to be read pile, which I think illustrates the ways in which living near an Oxfam Books branch* is hazardous to your reading lists. I always think, whilst weighing up a book under the watchful gaze of the young bloke who mans the shop on Saturday afternoons, “do I want to read this someday?”. Then “do I already have this on the pile?” (The Lovely Bones is the one that often causes confusion). Then I think “well, it’s only two quid and if I have got it, or I hate it, I can always donate it back and the charity gets four quid from the one book”.

Which is how I find myself with a large selection of contemporary “grumpy feminist” fiction (the Chap’s description, on noticing me piling up some Margaret Attwood, Jeanette Winterson and Fay Weldon), and an entire unread subsection dedicated to Will Self. On Saturday I went in to buy some coffee and have a browse, and came out with three books, including The West End Horror which I suspect I already have.

*technically, an Oxfam Music but it’s books section is the best in the neighbourhood.

I love Jamie Smart. Not in a emo teen girly way (he has quite enough of those fans already, I suspect), but in an actual “I will buy something that is otherwise like Attention Deficient Disorders were let loose with a printing press” (i.e. the Dandy*) for his strips. Not to mention the DFC**. And I’ve been raving about his stuff for ages, oh yes. But for anyone who mysteriously doesn’t have the collected Space Raoul on pre-order, Whubble is his weekly office based web comic.

I especially love this one.

*I was a Beano girl (and proud member of the Dennis the Menace fanclub) but even so, I don’t remember comics being just a load of PR releases for stuff for kids to buy, or pester parents to buy, slapped on the pages with a handful of strips tucked away somewhere. It’s bloody awful. Chuh.

** which is very much what I remember kids’ comics to be like, except neither the Beano nor Twinkle (I was young, ok, and it was the 1970s) had strips written by the Philip Pullman of the day.