Skip to main content

What do authors want for Christmas?

Apologies that Christmas seems to be cropping up rather a lot at the moment. Can I help it that there's a robin sitting on the branch outside my window at the moment?
Sorry about the shaky photo - it's too dark really, and taking through glass I couldn't use flash, but I wanted to prove it really is there.

As it's all the robin's fault (the robin made me do it), I feel quite happy telling you about a rather nice series of posts appearing on the Transworld blog, Between the Lines. They've asked various authors what they would like for Christmas. Here's Monday's entry, which includes Andy McNab, Joanne Harris, Jilly Cooper and John O'Farrell. Watch out all week for more of these entertaining musings.

Comments

  1. I guess this means you want a tripod for your camera for Christmas.

    ReplyDelete
  2. No, Bob, I've got a tripod, but the robin didn't look like it was going to stay around long enough for me to go to the cupboard, get it, assemble things and take a nice steady shot (this proved the case).

    I thought it was more important to have genuine on-the-spot reporting than a crisp, well focussed photo that was taken three weeks before. It really was taken in between lines of typing the blog.

    It's interesting - we accept that sort of fuzziness as part of the art in painting. No one says 'that Monet ought to have got himself a tripod'. But in photography it just looks a mess. Strange.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope