Anyhoo (yes "anyway" was already taken).

Rumours of my demise have been... pretty non-existent. I go all incommunicado on you and nobody notices. Which is a bit more incommunicado than I intended.

Anyway busyness, like demises, abounds. But it would take way to long to explain things (there's a half written full write up of part of it, which is currently clogging up Blogger), and I haven't time. Besides which I need to be quick and post with Blogger's servers are still working. Google, I'm not impressed when Blogger, all blogspot sites and Gmail simultaneously keel over. I'm also not to impressed by the way you managed to be crap enough at trademarks and brandnames meaning I might have to become me@wankilylongwebbasedemailservicename.com.

BTW, what's the betting on Gmail ever leaving Beta? Have they decided that the "by invitation only" aspect not only adds a certain caché (poor word choice) but also does reduce the tendency towards pornout which usually results in mutual degradation by competing email providers (hands up if you've had Hotmail routinely chuck legit mail in with the spam, and hands up again if your outgoing Hotmail is treated as spam when it gets to the other end).

Speaking of which, of the past couple of days I've had to give a certain site a good pounding, and it uses images on rotation on the main screen. Except with me it appears to have got stuck on the same one. This one. Just what I want to see when it's not even 9 o'clock yet on a Monday morning. [If the link shifts to something newer, a wider angle version is available here].

Other amusing items:
Heard on the radio (brother + washing = Radio 4) was the following corollary to the oft quoted "the early bird catches the worm*":
"But the second mouse gets the cheese".

Far too easily amused.

*Or indeed "word" as I just typed. It would of course have to be very early to catch the Word seeing as how that disappeared sometime in the previous decade, and it was on very, very early. Unless it was the other "the Word", in which case that too would have to very, very early, because it was in the beginning.

Being able to look out of window, and see rockets screeching parallel to the road is fun, especially when it's not my street. Fireworks night was spent indoors having been at the Nelson and Napoleon exhibition at the National Maritime Museumall day (and having been enjoying the delights of Wimbledon Village [you call that a village?] the night before). We went in at 12.45, and came out when it closed at 5. But when they start announcing the imminent closure, I wondered why it was closing at 3. So quite absorbing then. Some bits where fascinating, some intriguing, some delightful and some just a bit cheesy (but that fact it was in both English and French did seem to have tempered any bias).

Became slightly too engrossed by the maps of everything (Portsmouth Harbour; not what it was), and surprised by seeing Napoleon's neatly handwritten verbs translating French into English. I know I should have considered it before, given that officers happily dined with the foe, which rather suggests they could speak to each other, but Napoleon is the archetypal plus-francais Gallic leader. Tout le monde sera francais, donc la langue seule est francais (apologies to anyone who knows french, and thus has just winced at the grammar).

Oh, yes. The Grauniad's magazine thing leads with an article on Derek Draper and Kate Garraway. That'll be who?-squared then.

And one problem with things run by dyslexics for dyslexics is that no one has the remotest soupcon of organisational ability. Which lead to interesting phone confusion, as I tried to contact them, as they tried to get me.

The sirens outside remind me: that whole France brulé is a bit weird, non? It does rather suggest that outlawing the concept of differentness, ne marche terribly well pas, as well as having bizarre similarities to the type of logic which ends in doubleplusungood.

You know that whole dyslexic thing? Double-ply-sun-god.

But anyway, fourteen hundred cars cremated in one night is bloody petrifying. Although part of me wonders if perhaps there is a local Citroen factory under threat of closure. It's an easy way to bump up sales (and it does save turning the central heating on for a few more nights yet).

Going back to the NMM thing - I took some photographs after we left, but I haven't got copies of them yet (not my camera, uploaded [hopefully by now] onto not my computer, not yet emailed to me, thus not yet on Flickr. Yes, I know I have a fridgeful of films [pre the Portmerioning of my camera], but I haven't had time to get them developed, scanned and uploaded. Scanning's a bit of a bottleneck at the mo). So watch the space just over there.

That better be it, as it is far to late, and I have really anal stuff to wade through (and that really was a poor choice of words).

Anyhoo,