One Man's Notes

The staple of any charity shop: romance novels and tatty fantasy series.

Why do these two classes of books turn up in these shops with such frequency?

I suppose it's something to do with their target audience being voracious readers, who don't put any value in the books themselves once they're done with them.

Pulp clearly lives...

July 31, 2007

Flower

One of a group of photos I shot, while fruitlessly searching for a butterfly, as instructed by a recent Vox Hunt:

Flower in Mum's Garden

July 31, 2007

QotD: School Sports

What were the sports or games you played in high school or college?
Submitted by Stephen.

Fencing2

I was a serious fencer at school. The picture above isn't of me - it was taken by me sometime in the late 80s, when I was spending most of my weekends at various fencing competitions or team trainings for the Scottish Youth Squad, where I fought in the Epee team...

Here's another pic, showing what must have been one of the early uses of the electric hit registering system for sabre. The metallic piste on the floor was an integral part of the circuit:

Fencing1

July 30, 2007

QotD: Stress Case

People do many different things to cope with stress, loss, and "bumps in the road". How do you handle stress and hard times?
Submitted by RedlyGal.

whiskey

July 28, 2007

Cinema Mismanagement

So, on Friday night, Lorna and I went to the cinema. Boy, that was a mistake.

The cinema, the Odeon Greenwich, had decided to go back to back for the opening of Transformers either to "meet customer demand" or "make more money". Well, they may have succeeded in the latter, but they failed badly in the former. By the time we arrived at the cinema to collect our pre-booked 9.30pm showing tickets, the queue to get up to the screens was looped right around the circular building. Staff were surly and evasive when asked what was going on, and it took us three separate attempts to discover the back-to-back thing wasn't working very well for them, and all the screenings had fallen behind.

We finally got into the cinema well after 10pm, to find dirty seats and an unpleasantly aromatic cinema. And when the film started, 10% of it was on the side wall, not the screen itself. Several members of the audience had to go and complain before this was sorted out.

Oh, and when we emerged, the women's loo had run out of toilet paper.

Congratulations Odeon. We, after half a decade of using your cinema regularly, will never be darkening your doors again. If that's how you treat paying customers, I won't be a customer of yours any more.

July 27, 2007