This is a joke, isn't it? I'm sure genre specialists would be able to point out that it has all of the main features of satire. How many spoof sites are out there so far, I wonder?

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Just nipped in to Bloomberg's Space gallery in Finsbury Square. It's a beautiful building with a great show by Goshka Macuga called 'Kabinett der Abstrakten' which consists of a cabinet in the front room, some pillars in the back and a selection of works placed in the library. It includes work by a number of other artists. The library is great and is permanent. Anyone can just walk in and sit around in a beautiful space reading books (if you've got time, of course) and spy in on meetings and workers above and below.

The highlight for me was the suit worn by the first dog in space which was inside the cabinet. It looked very comical but was in fact genuine and not just a corset with a plastic snout stuck on top.

The bad news is that the exhibition ends tomorrow so there's no time to bring anyone else along.

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I totally approve of this</ a>

Question Time didn't depress me as much last night as it did last week but I was still shocked by some of the opinions. Maybe the stupidest thing I've heard all week was the idea that Benjamin Zephaniah turned down his OBE in a cyncial attempt to generate publicity for himself.

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Another fun thing about Hoxton in the evenings is lots of these

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Ohna thinks Hoxton is a bit like the Lower East Side. We were hanging out down here after going to the White Cube for a 'ritual' performed by Susan Stenger, Michael Clark and dancers in the space now occupied by the latest installation by Cerith Wyn Evans. It was fun hanging out with names that can be dropped and the music (by Varese, Stenger, Debussy and John Cage) and dancing was great. Susan Stenger is best known (by me anyway) for playing bass guitar but she was playing the flute last night. The most funnest thing, though, was being in an unusual space where people weren't sure where to stand or what to look at.

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Just so you know, 'Vicky's accent wobbles' will score you only one run in Eastenders cricket

My favourite score is four runs for 'an extra gets served a drink at the Vic without speaking'. Do you think extras usually don't speak because:

a) they would then need to be paid more?

b) the writers are worried about how they'll deliver a line.

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I wonder if the Eastenders people responsible for Vicky's accent have heard of this

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Apoa enjoyed her day out test-taking. She got a bit confused with the multiple choice, put some answers in the wrong place and for various reasons there were a few that she didn't answer. But at least she's got it out of the way and can get back to being a normal kid for a while. Her next exam is next Wednesday.

This (from Dr. S. J. Hannahs to the LINGUIST list) is the latest news on the sad situation at Durham where the Linguistics department is being closed down, despite being one of the best departments around:

In response to the recent LinguistList postings concerning the Linguistics department at Durham (Issues 14.3155 and 14.3183), some clarification is in order.

As it currently stands, delicate negotiations are underway between the University of Durham and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne concerning the transfer of linguists from Durham to Newcastle. The full outcome of these negotiations is not yet known, and is partially dependent on funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The current intention does not, sadly, involve the transfer of the whole department; however, we are confident that a fruitful venture can be established between linguists from Durham and the highly respected Linguistics Section at Newcastle.

We will let the community of linguists know how things progress!

Apoa's off to another first round test today. She's gone to school with a packed lunch and a see-through plastic bag containing: a letter with her candidate number, several sharpened pencils (the one she'll actually use is 2 centimetres long), a rubber and a pound to buy a drink and a biscuit. Alice will be collecting her and a few other kids from school this morning and taking them to the test. She won't be allowed to park, just to drop off and collect later.

It feels weird not helping her get there and back, and we'll be going straight out after work tonight, so we won't see her until tomorrow. She's said she'll phone when she gets home, though.

Last night, Apoa prepared for the exam by going straight from school to practice in a local orchestra and then rushing home to gulp a couple of bites of food before going off to play guitar in a concert and then heading home for a late bath and a chapter of Peter Pan. Maybe not the best preparation but she seems cool about it.

Meanwhile, we're all dealing with the fact that some kids didn't get through the first stage at the other school, which is definitely not nice.

I'm enjoying all the rain we're finally getting. It feels great once you've unpeeled all of your layers and made yourself a cuppa.

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This weekend included a visit from Rebecca and Derek who came for lunch with Thomas and Benjamin. It was fun watching them all playing together. They were very excitable in a way I associate with kids who don't see each other very often. We used to go mad whenever we saw our cousins. A big difference between Apoa and Kiloh and my childhood is that being on a farm in the countryside meant that we hardly ever saw any other kids so we always went a bit mad when we did.

We also went to a party where the dress code was '1963'. This was interpreted fairly loosely in general but one guest arrived in a full 1963 England football strip (although the shorts were suspiciously short, imho).

The highlight, though, was seeing Ray Harryhausen talking to Nick Park about animation. I mentioned this on Lecture List as well, but I didn't tell them about my shame as I tried to jump the book-signing queue and was told to get lost. My excuse for this terribly un-British behaviour was that I'd been first in the queue, i.e. first out to buy a book from the stand, but then went back to find everybody else, not realising that this would mean losing my place. We didn't have time to wait around and I'm not really bothered about signatures anyway, so we gave up. I did manage to get Nick Park to sign it, though. Is that a major breach of etiquette?

I haven't had time yet to get the book out of Ohna's bag and see what it's like. I know the cover's good, though.

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We heard this morning that Apoa got through the first exam she's taken for the two selective schools she's going for. The second exam is next week. Meanwhile, her first exam for the other school is this Wednesday. It'll be good when this is all over, although she is coping with it all very well.

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I did on Friday which meant it took me two hours to get to work this morning (half an hour by bike). The bus was delayed because of a road closure caused by someone trying to jump from suicide bridge. It's funny how people in London are so used to this as well as to tubes being delayed by people falling or jumping under the trains. My brother saw someone jump under a train recently. It's always a gruesome thought but if it doesn't happen in front of your eyes, then people seem to be able to shrug and carry on trying to get to where they're going.

I enjoyed this follow-up to Geoff Pullum's post about brevity on language log but I'm fighting hard not to get all pedantic about the bit of pragmatics in it.

By the way (he said, following the blogger's digression maxim), a linguist once joked to me that she was a pedant, pronouncing it 'peedant'. I still don't know whether the joke was that she was pedantically pronouncing it 'correctly' or pretending she didn't know how to pronounce it thus revealing that she was an amateur peedant. I wonder why I've never looked it up?

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And when did Clive James start taking nasty pills?

This story is number two in the blogdex chart of most contagious web pages at the moment, beating Michael Jackson into third place and beaten only by a joke from the toque

I must admit I'm not that shocked as I have always thought the American government was really only making a minimal effort to pretend the war was justified on moral grounds, let alone legal.

I'm more shocked by the extent to which the British public seems to be going along with the pro-war arguments at the moment. I was seriously depressed watching Question Time last night and had to turn it off in the end. The misrepresentation of anti-war views, the squashing of people trying to express them and the extreme rudeness to Vanessa Redgrave really got to me.

For the record, I'm pro-American, anti-Saddam, anti-terrorism and have no problem with Bush coming to visit. But I think it was wrong to go to war in the way they did. This combination of ideas doesn't seem to be permitted at the moment, except in those terrible North London circles I move in....

Jed sent me this:

The Nobel Prize Winning economist, Kenneth J Arrow, was in the USAAF meteorological unit during World War ll. He quickly came to the conclusion that the medium-term weather forecasts which he was producing were no better than randomly right, and so asked to be relieved of this duty. USAAF Headquarters replied: 'The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good; however, they are needed for planning purposes...'

It seemed particularly appropriate when I was waiting for the bus with Apoa and everyone in the queue was laughing at the totally inaccurate and constantly updating LED display saying which bus was supposed to be coming when.

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If you have any free time, then language log is a great way to use it up. I particularly enjoyed Geoff Pullum's long discussion of corpus fetishism, including the Morrisseyesque comment on certain reviewers who he decides it would be unkind to name:

...the only thing a fair-minded man like me can wish upon the reviewers is that they should die in obscurity

He followed this post with an (implicit, naturally) apology for his failure to follow one of Grice's maxims of manner.

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I haven't been living up to my status as a linguablogger very well recently so here is a highly dubious story from mirabilis

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This is the kind of thing that makes me think I live in a weird little world that doesn't connect much with the rest of the country. It reminds me of the feeling I got when all those people queued up after the queen mother died. I still haven't met anyone who had any interest in that, and I still haven't met anyone who thinks the Iraq war was definitely a good idea.

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I was slightly sceptical, partly because I quite enjoyed the strings. But it is actually very good, and a definite improvement on the original, mainly because it feels like a coherent album now. Mind you, I don't think the relative incoherence made it untypical. All of their albums were a bit disjointed, weren't they?

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Andy got us into the studio audience for Bruce Forsyth's return to the BBC on Saturday night. It was fun to see some of the technicalities and very cool to see Brucie in action close up. What a professional. It took him about three seconds to find the best people in the audience to work with - three ladies called Rita, Iris and Doreen who fell about laughing after every rude remark he made. Some of his jokes and routines must have been travelling around with him for around 50 years. But they're still funny.

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winnovators

kippers

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I'm quite excited that the 'raw' version of Let It Be is finally coming out on Monday.

The NME says it might be the best garage rock album of all time. But the BBC says it's 'not so much naked as, say, removing a jumper or loosening the tie a bit'

Anyway, I don't think it will be realistic competition for Bleach

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Thanks to Lecture List I went to the Ergonomics Society Lecture last night, which was fun, especially being introduced to concepts like 'hormesis'. I left my bike in town afterwards and went out with Mike and Ohna. So I had the pleasure of public transport this morning. So weird to be surrounded by so much misery and the ongoing soundtrack of announcements about strikes and 'no trains running' and so on...

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Just arranged to see Tanja next month. She pointed out that it's around 16 years since we saw each other. I'm now old enough to have that kind of a time gap and to find that when I look back over the 16 years I was already a grownup back then (well, up to a point).

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Way-hay, I just did 'weirdly well' on the Guardian's animation quiz (well, you can't work all day, can you?)

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I gave up caffeine ages ago (was it one year or two years? I'm not sure). I was having one of those 'isn't parental life tough?' conversations with Alan outside the playground and he told me he's just started consuming caffeine again because he can't keep up with his work otherwise. He starts drinking coffee at 9 in the evening after the kids have gone to bed, so that he can get enough energy together to do some work at home. I'm going to continue with trying to avoid that, though.

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Well, we have finally sent off all the forms for the various schools Apoa is applying for. Now we just need to torture her with homework and music practice until the end of January and then wait to see what happens. She's bearing up pretty well so far. She came back from a peace walk around Central London last night with a white poppy on her chest and another on her specs. I asked her about the walk and she told me about the difficulties of finding a chip shop that was open and how they settled for chocolate and crisps. When I asked her about the 'peace' part she explained that she, Jessie, Anna and Rachel were fairly peaceful at times.

I had to miss the walk because I was swimming with 18 elfins (6-9 year old woodcraft folk). Being male was definitely the short straw when we noticed the grownup to child ratios in the two changing rooms. The good bit, though, was having a session in the pool where there were professionals on hand to keep the kids safe and under control.

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This was one of the questions in our pub quiz last night. It was approximately the only one we knew the answer to.

The quizmaster said about one question ('what are canopus and caloosahatchee?') that this referred to a news story we would all have heard about. But it turned out I hadn't even heard the story. It made me realise that I've been reading books lately and not reading newspapers. I think I'm just keeping up to speed with the top two or three stories every day. On the radio today, this story entered the top three and I heard about it for the first time. I'm not complaining, though. The books have been good.

The answer, btw, is that they're the proper names of the toxic ships George Bush is sending in advance of his own visit next week. And not, as we guessed, the proper names of Jake and Dinos Chapman's two plastic shagging people (well he did say it was topical and 'coming to a head' next week).

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Ohna came home on Saturday B-))

She had been enjoying some rather fine food in Milan and brought some of it back with her, including a huge wedge of top quality parmeggiano and a bottle of Amarone which was absolutely delicious (for connoisseurs it was a 1999 Villa Borghetti). Apparently, this was the wine which complemented Hannibal Lecter's meal of census taker with fava beans. I remembered it as being a 'fine chianti' but apparently it was a 'big amarone'. Maybe the book is different from the film, or maybe I'm remembering the French and Saunders version rather than Anthony Hopkins. Anyway, it was very good, even if we didn't have any fava beans or anything.

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