TMINE

Teaching an old blog new tricks

Woo hoo, I’m back. Let there be feasting and a national day of celebration. Or a collective rolling of eyes at the very least.

Subscribe by emailThere are a couple of new things for the blog that I just thought I’d draw your attention to. First, you can now get blog updates by email. Each day, between 5pm and 7pm UK time, you’ll get sent all the new posts of the day in a beautifully formatted email. It won’t be the full post, necessarily, just the bit you’d see on the front page, but it’s quite nice and saves you from having to remember to come to the blog.

You can sign up for it here or over in the sidebar. There’s a similar email for the day’s comments, too.

Second new thing is “threaded comments”. Now you can indicate you’re replying to a previous comment by clicking on a reply link next to the comment. When the comment appears, it’ll have a link to the original comment, so everyone can see who you were talking back to.

It seems to work, anyway, although I haven’t implemented it on the preview page yet. Use it, don’t use it, the choice is yours. It just seemed nice to me, even if does slightly upset the formatting at the moment.

Threaded comments

The best of this year’s bad sex

It’s time for the results of the Literary Review‘s annual bad sex award. First-time novelist Iain Hollingshead has managed to take the top place, and you can read the nominated passages from the shortlist over at The Guardian.

I was particularly taken by David Mitchell’s “If Dawn Madden’s breasts were a pair of Danishes, Debby Crombie’s got two Space Hoppers”, but Hollingshead’s “we’re lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks” has a certain je ne sais quoi, I must admit.

In flight ‘entertainment’

I’m back, slightly jet-lagged but ready for action. Sooty, the weather-forecasting puppet bear, was right and it did indeed chuck it down something chronic while I was there. Thank you, Sooty. And if you’re ever thinking of going to Raleigh, North Carolina, the main/only attraction is the Angus Barn, BTW.

Since this ‘ere blog is The Medium is Not Enough, I’d probably be letting the side down if I didn’t review the in-flight entertainment system.

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