What's with today, today?

One thing I love, if you haven't noticed, is words! The English language in general (and other languages as well, to a lesser extent) is fascinating. I love to read, and write, and I really like etymology. I am maybe a little bit obsessed. Anyway, my friend Sam posted up a link to a word-related-site that I absolutely have to share with you: podictionary . It contains word-trivia in written and podcast form. Fabulous. And through that I found another site: Wordnik . It has words, definitions, etymology, quotes, and graphs showing usage over time. That's pretty cool. The information seems incomplete for a bunch of words, but I really like the idea and the way its executed. Check it out!

Sometimes the whole internet, nay the world eve, seems designed to make me annoyed. I don't think I'm the only one who has had days like that, nor is it new, there is a reason I stopped watching/reading the news! Don't know why I started again... Anyway, this post is not designed to make people angry at the world, this is a post for all things nice and smile-worthy, this is a post... for LINKS! While I have known of this comic for a while, I just started reading Hark! A Vagrant in a concentrated way and I am enjoying it. Comics! About history! What's not to like? http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php She has historical figure heroes, and so do I. My favourite is Alfred the Great. Man, he was great. I just bought the Florence and the Machine album, 'Lungs', and I am loving it so far! It just won the British Album award at the Brit awards (so much more deserving than Lady Gaga, oh my). Here's a link to 'Dog Days are Over' on YouTube, one of my favou...

are what it's all about. Like the bus driver I had today who greeted us all as we got on the bus, made the bus laugh with his running commentary and added: 'Next stop the Enmore theatre. I will not be performing there tonight because I will be on this bus' I kind of love that bus driver, even though what I really wanted was to sit and read my book and ignore the rest of the world. Like the free copy of last year's Good Food Guide I got with my newspaper. I should do this every day.

The last post I wrote about books I was feeling dissatisfied. I kept picking holes in everything, books were annoying me rather than engaging me and even Agatha Christie was not up to par. It was a disgruntling time. Luckily, come Christmas I got a bunch of books to read to hopefully get over it. And get over it I did! The first book I read was 'Wolf Hall' by Hillary Mantel, and that cheered me right up. I don't know if I've ranted about this before, but I have a slight aversion to historical fiction. It's just that I've read too much bad historical fiction, and although there is some that I like (Phryne Fisher from the '20s, Rosemary Sutcliff's books from all over) there are a few things that just bug me and they happen over and over again: Anachronistic characters. I know that it might be hard to make sympathetic characters with an unsympathetic worldview, but when you are, say, in a society where women have a lower status than men then you should exp...