I almost forgot, but I heard about the following link yesterday. Regardless of one's opinion of Microsoft or their products, this has to be one of the most awful videos ever inflicted on anyone. (For background: MS are trying to persuade their customers to advertise the new operating system Windows 7 on their behalf.)

You can choose whichever activities are best for you. Because it's your party

Ye gods. Ever get the feeling that whoever thought of this campaign has never been to an actual party?

(For what it's worth, I've no idea how Windows 7 will be radically different to Vista. All I've read about it makes it sound like Vista with more flashy things that nobody really needs. I tolerate Windows, and have Vista on my home system. I actually like one thing about it a lot, namely that you can search for any file and find it in less than two seconds. This was impossible in previous Windowses. Though, presumably, v easy with a Mac.)

UPDATE: After you've watched that one (or stabbed yourself in the face to make it stop, whichever comes first), watch this one. Aha, I say, ahahahaha. Internet, we love thee.

Today I received a parcel from Amazon I'd ordered last week on something of a whim. They included this novel and two Teach Yourself book+CD language kits: Irish and Spanish. I want to learn Spanish because I'm travelling in a Spanish-speaking country later this year and need to be able to buy beer/chat up senoritas/fend off hyenas. I want to learn Irish because I've actually recently fostered the opinion that it's quite a pretty language. And also, I suppose, because I feel some bizarre sense of guilt that I should know it, at least slightly, because I'm Welsh and in some way a Celtic linguist and, therefore, should know something about my own language's sister languages.

( Read more... )

This Times column by Daisy Waugh (the link is to a discussion of said column) is pretty unabashed in its entirely unnecessary ridiculing of Wales and the Welsh and the Welsh language. The gist of Waugh's column seems to be that house prices in rural Wales are such that they allow one to purchase a bigger house there than one would in central London. Quelle surprise: surely that's always been true. Nevertheless, if it gives her column inches, so be it. What's both bizarre and frankly unacceptable is that she has decorated her commentary with a number of comments about Welsh which is at best misinformed and, at worst, just racist.

I'll let you read it for yourself. Frankly, the unimaginative rambling of a Londoncentric hack is nothing to me, because I know her opinions are simply wrong. What worries me is that a respected journal such as the Sunday Times (I don't read it, but, y'know) publishes this kind of thing. Is it any sort of commentary at all? What use does it have? Reminding the readership of the so-called backwardness of Welsh people (backwards because, presumably, we have reasonable house prices and a definable own culture--even if Ms Waugh doesn't see it as such)? That seems to be a rather dangerous thing to do. Or it would be if being anti-Welsh were considered at all Not On in the British media at large.

Waugh is right on one thing, though. Wales has slipped through the 'sensitivity' net with regard to what people can make fun of nowadays. Along with fat people, apparently. A clever journo might have used this to make an ironic point. Unfortunately, as far as I can see, Daisy Waugh has not gone down this route.

EDIT: Hmm. Just sent a deeply sarky letter to the Sunday Times editor. May prove to regret that later...

Hell yes.

Looks like stupid-but-fun entertainment. The portrayal of Watson (by, um, Jude Law) feels much closer in spirit to the ex-military man of the books, and the oft-ignored mischievous side of Holmes himself suits somebody of Downey Jr.'s exuberance. Of course, it could simply rape the hell out of everything Conan Doyle ever wrote, but I'm always up for a decent 'reimagining' as long as it's in the spirit of things.

If you are familiar with Welsh, you may have heard of the Welsh strict poetic system called cynghanedd (usually translated as "harmony"). It's v popular amongst the kids in the street, as you can imagine, and predictably there's a website hub where poets and aspiring poets congregate to discuss cynghanedd 'n' shit: Annedd y Cynganeddwyr. At the moment there's a (in a members-only area) collaborative poem (cywydd) being composed, where poets suggest (often incognito) a couple of lines at a time, to build up a metrically correct poem bit by bit. As you can imagine, I find this great fun, although most sane people wouldn't.

The current poem being written is about "rock and roll", and the brief is to compose a cywydd deuair hirion using exclusively the names of individuals or groups from the world of popular music. Use of conjunctions etc. is disallowed. Brilliantly, you can still write something which is in complete adherence to the hugely intricate (and often downright stupid) rules of cynghanedd, even when almost none of the words in it are Welsh.

You probably won't be able to appreciate this very much if you're not aware that there are, essentially, four different types of line of cynghanedd you can write (and that this cywydd includes them all many times over), but if you read it out, you may hopefully realise that it's not just a random list of names, but that there's end rhyme, internal rhyme and internal asonance everywhere. It may not be poetry, but it's pretty cool.

(It's work in progress, obv. I've asterisked the lines I contributed.)

( It's below the cut )

There was a follow-up article of sorts in The Sun today to the one yesterday. It's somewhat sinister IMO.

Deva Kumarasiri from Sri Lanka is a Nottingham postmaster and Lib Dem councillor, and he refuses to serve customers except in English. ( Read more... )

(And no, I don't read The Sun attentively every day. I just look at the pictures.)

More or less explicit in this hateful article (front page today) in the red top The Sun is the supposition that anyone living in the UK who does not have English as a first language is automatically less intelligent, or at least less worthy, than those who do. (Edit: the headline was 'Broken English'. Make of that what you will.)

( More below the cut )

FACE meet PALM.

The Tintin books by Herge are things that, I suspect, a large number of western European children grow up with. I can't speak for the rest of the world, though God knows the works have been translated into almost as many languages as there are languages. Certainly I read those that were translated into Welsh, and all of the English-language ones many, many times. I also bought and read the infamous Tintin au Congo, which was only available in French at the time, and includes awful stereotypes of black people, and Tintin killing almost every endangered animal he finds. Elephants and tigers are his bitches.

( Tintin on film )

Like I did last year, I've decided that, rather than write 5,000 words of my thesis, I would have more fun writing 5,000 words of a stupid short story instead. So here it is, for you to read or ignore at your whim. Merry Christmas! Nadolig llawen!

Title: Average King Wenceslas
Author: peredur_glyn
Ratings: Adult
Word count: 4,800ish
Warning: Contains strong language and scenes of alcohol abuse.
Summary: It's c.925 AD and Wenceslas I of Bohemia isn't doing as well in the polls as he'd like...

( Read the story )