sweet effay

Here you see the winning entry from the open class at the local horticultural show. So what did I win for this masterpiece? The princely sum of thirty-five pence. We don't half live the high life out here in the Flatlands.

...that the Daily Mail and it's readers constitute an unholy alliance of nostalgia for an age that never was, reactionary knee-jerking, and plain stupidity.

Royal Mail has begun selling postage over the Internet and with uncanny precision, the DM and its fetid followers have pounced upon the central outrage of this pernicious act. Is it the fact that such a move will deprive Post Offices of yet more income, thereby constituting one more step in Royal Mail's ongoing campaign, aided and abetted by government complicity, to reduce the size of the network by taking so much business away that smaller Post Offices are forced to close, thereby simultaneously allowing Royal Mail to claim that it's not their fault and obviating the need to dish out redundancy payments? Ermm, no actually: it's the fact that the new downloadable labels will not have the Queen's head on them.

Click the link. Check out the outrage in the readers' comments, then wonder at the stupidity of a such a large bunch of imbeciles getting worked up over this terrible change, all of whom have apparently failed to notice that the Queen's head has been absent from vast quantities of their mail for decades due to the use of franking machines and printed Post Office labels.

Every week I buy a TV guide, and every week I hurl it across the room complaining bitterly about the fact that there’s nothing worth watching. Next week however is a different story: two decent, nay essential, programmes!
Sunday, ITV 23:10 – The South Bank Show on J.G. Ballard
Friday, BBC2 23:35 – The Fall: The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith.
So I can finally give the DVD player a couple of nights off.

What are we doing in the Little House? Playing Lego Star Wars II: very probably the best video game ever made.

Remember how the introduction of university top-up fees was not going to put off students from poorer backgrounds and would certainly not end up discriminating in favour of the well off? Of course you didn't believe it and neither did I, but here's something that I never imagined even at my most cynical:
Degree discount for up-front cash.

Okay, the evenings are drawing in as the long hot summer heads towards to a close, the Secret Blog has been consigned to the abyss, so it’s time to come crawling back here again. Expect more of the same insightful commentary at least until December when Thomas Pynchon’s latest thousand page opus hits the shelves. Oddly enough, I was just planning to re-read Gravity’s Rainbow, but now I can put that off until I have ploughed through this monster.

Flatlands living goes on as before, although the Little House has had it’s roof fixed, meaning that we are now cosy but skint. Not so skint, however that I haven’t just zoomed over to Threshold House to pick up the new versions of The Remote Viewer and Black Antlers. If you’re lucky, there will be more on them when I have heard them. If you’re unlucky, I’ll see if I can attract some more illiterate hate mail by slagging off Quizmania again.