It’s hard to comprehend how fast this year has gone, how quickly our baby is turning into our toddler. This time last year we were holding our helpless newborn in our arms; today we are videoing him charging around his grandparents lounge.
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Happy first birthday Evan. We all love you very much.
October, 2007:
An open letter to Oxford University Press.
Dear Mr Press
Before I start I feel I should give you a friendly word of warning. I recently purchased a dictionary from your arch rivals the Cambridge University Press. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the words in there are remarkably similar to the ones in your own book. They even have put them in the same order! If I were you I should get your copyright lawyers on the case straight away.
Anyway, onto the main point of my letter. I hereby submit my proposal for a new word for the next edition of your dictionary. As you can see it covers a function in the language which is currently left unserved.
Disglightful
adjective. [dis-glahyt-fuhl]A simultaneously revolting and charming moment. Example of use: Evan pulled the soggy half eaten lump of bread from his mouth, let it pause on his snot covered upper lip, then gently and lovingly tried to feed it to his father. “Disglightful” thought Dan.
I look forward to receiving my first royalty check with anticipation
Yours sincerely
Dan Hughes BA(hons) BSc(hons) RMN.
Age 31 â…”
A peek at my desktop
Dan Leone tagged me to post a screen capture of my desktop. Well he showed me his, so I’ll show him mine:
Hardly the most thrilling of images I admit. But I rarely pass over the opportunity to talk about myself here on the blog, so I shall give you the guided tour.
On the bottom left you will notice a stack of pdf files which contain swimming pool timetables. I have a friend that used to work as a lifeguard at a local baths. He told me that they only change the water once every six months. Using my own behavior as a child as a rough guide, I estimate that by around the fifth month the pool is approximately 68% child urine. Despite this knowledge we actually go swimming quite a bit.
On the bottom right you will see a stray folder of photos from our recent trip to Blackpool which I haven’t got round to filing properly yet. My archiving system consists of shoving all the unsorted and unedited photos onto an external hard drive once every couple of months or so. I have this vague notion that I will go through it and sort them all properly at some mystical point in the future when I “have more time”. I intend to do this right after I’ve mended all the holes in my socks and sorted out the “bits and bobs” drawer in the kitchen.
And finally, hovering in the left of center is my iChat window, ever optimistically open just in case someone lowers themselves to IM me. Incidentally any of the regular readers is more than welcome to add me to their contact lists should they see fit. I am on AIM and my username is dghughes28 (yes I know giving that out is almost a direct contradiction to my previous statements about becoming more anonymous; but I want to feel popular damnit).
For anyone who wants to replicate my magnificent taste in desktop wallpaper, you can find a lot of great ones here.
So now for the tags:
- Paul. Because he was whittering on about how great his computer was in the pub the other night.
- Lee. Because I want to settle a bet with myself surrounding whether he has Aquaman or Captain Kirk wallpaper
- Mr Fabulous. Because I dread to think (and like to aim high on occasion).
- Jeff. Because I know he’s always up for a good meme.
- Henry. Because I still owe him some questions and feel very guilty.
And of course you, if you fancy it. Here is the cut an paste instructions should you need a guide:
Upon receiving this tag, immediately perform a screen capture of your desktop. You can do a screen capture by:
On a PC
- Going to your desktop and pressing the Print Scrn key (located on the right side of the F12 key).
- Open a graphics program (like Picture Manager, Paint, or Photoshop) and do a Paste (CTRL + V).
- If you wish, you can “edit†the image, before saving it.
On a Mac:
- Open Grab (located in /Applications/Utilities).
- Choose Capture > Screen.
- When the Screen Grab dialog opens, click outside that window.
In which Dan courts controversy, part II
On the journey back from swimming on Sunday Evan fell asleep in the car. When we arrived home I decided against waking him and so sat out in the car until he woke up. After around half an hour of aimless radio station surfing I eventually let the dial settle on Elaine Paige’s Radio 2 show.
According to her BBC biography Paige is the undisputed first lady of British musical theatre. That may well be true. All I know is that she takes up valuable radio airspace with her inane “songs from the shows” at a time when I’m often driving either to or from work. In fact the entire of the BBC appears to conspire in order to make my journey between home and work as tedious as humanly possible. But that is perhaps a rant for another day. Today my bile will be reserved for the subject of musicals.
Now while I am certainly not the most ardent fan of the bland and tedious theatrical genre, I do concede that musicals do have their place. Granted that place is in the DVD collection of a three year old girl, but I’m not here to advocate they be wiped from the face of the earth. What I am advocating however is that musicals be reserved for professional performers only.
As I’ve mentioned before I used to be heavily involved in amateur dramatics. I feel they are a wonderful way of fostering a sense of community and providing an outlet for people’s creativity. But the obsession most amateur production companies have with staging musicals dismays me. Not because the genre is consistently aimed at the lowest common denominator (which it is), or because the good actors who with poor singing voices get sidelined in favor of poor actors with good singing voices (which they do), but because most musicals are set in America. And if your play is set in America then the actors have to do an American accent.
If there is one thing guaranteed to make my ears bleed it is a bad English actor putting on an atrocious American accent. What’s worse is that they often insist in singing in it too. The whole thing makes me cringe so badly that I have been carried out of theaters in the past because of the mistaken belief that I was in the midst of an epileptic fit.
And another thing. Ever since Jerry Springer: The Opera there has been a complete overload of “alternative” musicals. Trust me, just putting “the musical” after the name of a prominent politician or celebrity (see Tony Blair: the musical, Blunkett: The Musical, of Saddam: the musical to name but three) does not conjure up images of delightfully witty postmodern intellectuals subverting a well worn genre in order to make sparkling satirical observations. No, it just reeks of unoriginal hacks leaping on a tired overloaded bandwagon.
As the mighty Holmes once so eloquently stated: musicals aren’t plays, they are spectacles. In essence they are basically tourist attractions. And, done correctly, they can be magnificent like the Taj Mahal or the Empire State Building. Done badly however they can be as nerve shatteringly tortuous as a week trapped in the Brontë museum in Haworth.
Amateur musicals. Just say no.
As a postscript directed towards all my friends who regularly perform in amateur musicals who may be reading this. I obviously didn’t mean your musicals. They were wonderful and I loved every moment of them. No, I meant those other musicals. The ones you weren’t in.
The root of all humor
Farewell Uncle Sam
My brother Sam leaves tomorrow for his big adventure. His flight leaves at 10am bound for Singapore, and he will spend the next four weeks slowly making his way through various parts of Asia. He intends to reach Australia some time in the middle of November, at which point he will hang up his hat and declare himself home for at least the next year or so.
He came round to say goodbye this afternoon, and rather fortuitously witnessed Evan’s first steps. That’s probably a good omen in one culture or another.
If Sam were not my brother I’d say he was a witty, clever, and pleasant sort of chap to be around. As he is my brother however I’m duty bound to refer to him only as a puerile little snot rag who deserves every beating I gave him in our youth.
What I will say is make sure you follow his blog over the next few weeks. It’s already pretty great and can only get even more interesting.
Are you talking to me or chewing a brick?
Evan and I both had haircuts today. Mine was significant only in that it further reduced my already depleted stock. Evan’s haircut however was the first one he’d ever had.
Actually that’s untrue. When he was around six months old we took the scissors to his locks in order to get rid of a strange mohawk thing he had going on. But that didn’t count as a proper haircut, more of a trim really. This time we gave his entire head a good going over with the electric hair clippers. A team of South Australian sheep shearers couldn’t have done a better job.
Unfortunately we don’t like it. He’s gone from looking like little Lord Faulteroy to looking like Vinnie Jones. He’s also recently accidently acquired a black eye from an over exuberant big sister, and this only serves to add to the hard man image.
Perhaps we could hire him out as a bouncer at the playgym or something.
A Self-indulgence of Bloggers
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about collective nouns. On one hand I enjoy them for their poetry: a murder of crows, skulk of foxes, bloat of hippopotami. On the other some of them get a little ridiculous: a shrewdness of apes, flange of baboons, horde of hamsters.
What I would like to know is who actually regulates them. Wiktionary lists 13 different collective nouns for bees alone: bike, byke, cast, cluster, colony, drift, erst, game, grist, hive, rabble, and swarm. That’s more words than Eskimos have for snow (although, interestingly enough, not as many as the English have for farts). Now granted wikis are far from being the most reliable source in academia, but still it is evident that someone needs to inject a little order into proceedings.
With that in mind I am proposing some new collective nouns for my own family. Granted, barring the invention of some sort of time travel device or cloning machine, the possibility of there being more than one of Kerry, Amy, Evan or I in the same place at the same time is fairly remote. But I’ve seen Multiplicity, I know it could happen. It’s always best to be prepared for such things.
- A Bumbling of Dans
- An Organisation of Kerrys
- A Pinkness of Amys
- A Mucus of Evans
What would be your own collective nouns?