Poor Cory! What a way to find out what the term means.
For those who haven’t heard it before: “U.K.: petty bureaucrat: a minor official who insists on following regulations to the letter, especially with the intention of being deliberately obstructive ( informal )”
Feh.
Yeah, well. What a surprise. This continent has many microclimates.
Meanwhile: in the “Fascinating Google Searches” department (i.e. “what brought people to youngwizards.com”):
“magic spell for reading a woman mind”
(snort) You know…the cheapest way to do this is to ask her what’s on her mind. Many women are so astonished to be asked that they’ll share far more of what they’re thinking about than you ever hoped. So forget the “hair of woolfe” and other exotica that many “spells” call for.
In general, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight got it right:
“What a woman wants is her way.”
(Kind of like “what a man wants,” but the good Goddess forbid I should mention that.) (Because only women are supposed to want, you know, what they want.) (Sheesh. Would someone clue the guys in on this?? They are missing something VERY BASIC.)
(more snorting)
It’s been one of those business things that happens when you’re making other plans. (sigh) Zurich/Basel, Strasbourg, Paris, Geneva: one day each. Not enough time to settle in anywhere. A new checkout every morning. And it was raining in Paris. In lilac time. There is no justice. (Well, there is justice, but sometimes it manifests really strangely.)
Meanwhile, this phonecam shot from Gare de Lyon in Paris. Most of the people in the shot are reacting to some supporters of a football (US: “Soccer”) club heading off to a match, waving flags, blowing whistles and singing encouraging songs.
The cat has heard it all. Throws a glance at the writer of wizardly stuff, sitting off to one side with her luggage and her coffee, and moves on.
Note to YW fans: doubtless a gating technician, caught en passant. (With all the stations in Paris, and the age of the place, they probably need a fair number of them. Nearly as many as at Chur, which is smaller, but somewhat older in terms of human settlement.)
Just what I needed: a 419 Scam form letter.
(I still can’t get over the scam mail I got from “Mrs. Doris Bongo…mother of Prince Dave Bongo…”. Doubtless this is that new, relaxed style of royalty we keep hearing about.)
Also good for a laugh for fans of scambaiting: 419 Eater, Scamorama, and Whatsthebloodypoint.com. (This last one has something new: a user shares a scam letter in which you’re expected, not only to send them money for a hotel room at a conference, but to write an abstract of the scientific paper you’ll present there! Sheesh.)
Actually, I knew about it before, but this is the first time I had a link to the OED’s own rundown on the project:
‘Where in the multiverse…?’: researching the vocabulary of science fiction for the OED”
“Some of the entries we have published from the project include Martian, meteor storm, mind-meld (from ‘Star Trek’), moon base, and multiverse, and out-of-sequence entries bot (a robot), filk (a type of song performed by SF fans), and Sturgeon’s Law (‘90% of everything is crap’, formulated by writer Theodore Sturgeon).”
The home of the project itself is at http://www.jessesword.com/SF .
Interested in having a look without needing to register? Feel free.
(The second chapter of Wizards at War is up today, as well.)
Now I’m going out to pour weedkiller all over the lawn.
Sounds like it might be.
“Organizers of ‘ReJoyce Dublin 2004,’ a festival in honor of Joyce’s modernist classic, plan to dish up a free breakfast for 10,000 people which will require 25,000 pork sausages, 20,000 pigs’ kidneys and 12,500 bacon rashers.
“The fry-up on Dublin’s historic O’Connell Street in June, will also entail 20,000 blood puddings, 15,000 bread rolls, 10,000 tomatoes and 500 kg (1,100 pounds) of butter. ”
…What, no potato farl? [sulk!] But at least the black pudding’s in there.
(Note to Peter: you should post something about this to alt.2eggs.sausage.beans.2toast.largetea.cheerslove.)
“Can I have a Mountain Dew?”
(snort) From the Dead Alewives Theatre: “Dungeons and Dragons: An 8-Bit Re-Enactment.”
…And this one too. It’s “Moogles”, BTW, not “muggles”.
…for the YW pages (YoungWizards.com and YoungWizards.net):
“Listen to young wizards a wizards vacation for free”
(sigh) There goes another five cents’ worth of royalties, I guess. (Yes, the books are out on audio (check Audible or iTunes. And yes, some of them are out “in the wild”.) …But whoever the searcher is, they’re not going to find a book with that title. Well, not mine, anyway…
This search surprised me, though:
“deep wizardry cliff notes”
Interesting. Is the book being assigned somewhere as homework? I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t think I want to be anyone’s homework (at least not beyond the “book report” level. I do get a lot of mail that starts out “Hi, I am in Mrs. X’s Xth-grade class and we had to [read a book] [write to an author]…”). But I see my stuff as primarily recreational, the kind of thing you read under the blankets with a flashlight.
Ah well… the world will do what it will.
In recent searches that brought people to Out of Ambit:
“how to get a cat out of a tree”
“old irish poems”
“dictionary snowpod” (??)
“girls wearing wellies” (not here, sorry)
“princess diane”, “princess diane body”, “princess diane picture” (Not her, either. Poor woman, why won’t they let her be?) (Dumb question. Because she sells tabloids…)
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
“Tamale Chef Kills Friend, Cooks Him”
(sigh) Human beings. What a species.
All I can say is, once again, thanks so much to BoingBoing.
“NUMENOREANS: Life is cool. Why do we have to die?
ELVES: You’re human?
NUMENOREANS: Can the Valar fix that?
VALAR: No.
NUMENOREANS: That sucks. Go away.
ELVES: Fine.
ELENDILI: Hey! Over here! We still like you!
MEN OF MIDDLE-EARTH: Gosh, we’re lonely.
NUMENOREANS: Whatever, give us your wealth and your children.
MEN OF MIDDLE-EARTH: Um, okay.
ELENDILI: This isn’t gonna end well, is it?
ELVES: No.”
“Why did the two cyanide groups go to see a psychiatrist? Because they were both ‘in dinile’…”
Oww! Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!
…The site linked to above is probably not work-safe if your boss thinks that seeing mildly naughty words makes you evil or unemployable. There are some cool molecules there, whatever your employer may think about it.
…I just have to quote this from the third page of the site. Heaven knows what’s going to happen to Google searches for the blog now…
“From Flybase, a database of fruit-fly genes maintained by a consortium of research institutions. The genes were named by the researchers who discovered them. Convention suggests that if the genes’ human counterparts are discovered, they will be given the same names:
“‘aloof, always early, amontillado, bang senseless, bang sensitive, bride of sevenless, brother of odd with entrails limited, bumper-to-bumper, couch potato, crack, crossbronx, Daughter killer, daughter of sevenless, Deadpan, deathknell, Dinty, disco-related, dog of glass, effete, eggroll, enoki mushroom, escargot, ether a go-go, fear-of-intimacy, fuzzy onions, genghis khan, glass bottom boat, Godzilla, Grunge, gut feeling, helter-skelter, he’s not interested, hoi-polloi, In dunce, inebriated, jekyll and hyde, just odd knobs, ken and barbie, king tubby, klingon, ladybird early, ladybird late, lemming, long island expressway, maelstrom, Malvolio, members only, mozzarella, naked cuticle, nanking, okra, out at first, oxen, pacman, papillote, pentagon, pugilist, quagmire, quick-to-court, redtape, Revolute, roadkill, rolling stone, sawtooth, scab, scott of the antarctic, scruin like at the midline, sevenless, Sex lethal, shank, similar to Deadpan, singles bar, slamdance, spotted dick, stranded at second, Thor, thousand points of light, Trailer hitch, vibrator, viking.'”