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I've added a new feature to the Gruts homepage sidebar: Recent bookmarks. It contains links to stuff elsewhere on the web which might be of interest to anyone who finds the sort of stuff I write about on Gruts vaguely interesting. I sometimes bookmark stuff I'm thinking of writing about on Gruts, so this new feature might well end up scooping me.
For the nerds amongst you, it's run using del.icio.us, and there's an RSS feed.
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[Postscript: I have since got rid of this extremely useful feature.]
Do you know how to twist? It goes like this, goes like this, goes like this…
Echo & the Bunnymen, Do It Clean (live):
I spotted a really cool butterfly yesterday. It looked for all the world like a dollop of bird poo. Remarkable mimicry. That's evolution for you.
This afternoon, I spoke with Stense on the phone and told her about the butterfly. I explained how I had tried to look it up in my Collins Complete British Insects book, but it hadn't been in there. I said that I was pretty confident I had discovered a species of butterfly which was entirely new to science. That being the case, I would name it after her: Lepidoptera stensonis, or something like that.
Stense said she didn't want something which looks like a dollop of bird poo naming after her. I said that some people are never bloody satisfied.
Stense needn't have worried: I later worked out that my butterfly was a female orange-tip [Anthocharis cardamines].
The female orange-tip doesn't have an orange tip. That's what threw me.
BBC: Indiana Jones is back - and on form
… Director Steven Spielberg has largely jettisoned computer generated effects (much to the chagrin of tech freak Lucas) with the result that the film's action sequences have a visceral, physical quality you rarely find in modern-day blockbusters.
My biggest fear for this film was that the CGI would take over. That's not what Indiana Jones is about. CGI is too clinical and elegant; Indiana Jones is totally inelegant (in an extremely stylish way).
Glad Spielberg put his foot down. Pity he couldn't overrule Lucas on Jar Jar Binks.
See also: The Cotton Mill Express
ABBA, Ace of Base, Alfred Nobel, Anders Celsius, Anders Jonas Ångström, Anita Ekberg, Björn Borg, Britt Ekland, Carolus Linnaeus, Greta Garbo, Hans Blix, IKEA, Ingrid Bergman, Janna Svenson, Max von Sydow, Roxette, Saint Birgitta, Sven-Göran Eriksson, Ulrika Ericsson, Ulrika Jonsson… I could go on all day.
The simple truth is, we have a lot to thank Sweden for.
By way of a small tribute, therefore, and to make Gruts more Swede-friendly, I have now included a translate this page into Swedish facility at the bottom of the Gruts home page.
Tack, Sverige!
Update: The Swedish translation facility has since been removed, on account of the elks.
Couldn't we forge them with interesting people instead?
For reasons I won't bother you with, I was thinking about the syllable pib yesterday.
As syllables go, it's not all that unusual: consonant-vowel-consonant, easy to pronounce, not an actual word—but there's no reason on earth why it couldn't be.
Then I tried to think of words which begin with the syllable pib. I eventually came up with pibald.
I found pibald a totally unsatisfactory answer to my self-imposed challenge to find a word beginning pib_ for two reasons: (1) piebald is how I (and, I hope, most other people) would normally spell the word, and, more importantly, (2) the letters P, I, B are not pronounced as a single syllable: it's pi-bald. Like I said, totally unsatisfactory.
So I racked my brains for a while, trying to come up with another word which begins pib_. I failed.
So I've just looked in my Compact Oxford English Dictionary (the full-hit dictionary printed so small that it comes with a magnifying glass to help you read it), and here are the pib_ words listed in it:
So now I know.
I wonder why so few words begin with pib_.
(Don't get me started on beb_.)
What Jen and I and most of Jen's family misheard her (Irish) mum to say in the pub last night:
What's the difference between a ship and a boat?
… Is it a yacht?
I've just worked out why, when the Halifax Bank merged with the Bank of Scotland to make HBOS, they chose to merge the two banks' initials in the order that they did.