Grammar

I'd always thought that a former boss of mine had a very poor style of writing, so in an idle moment I decided to lift a sample of his prose from the internet and run it through one of those grammar-testing sites. Sure enough he only scored 43% and the prognosis was 'weak - needs revision'. Hah! thought I. Now to try me. Result! I got 73% and the comment 'adequate - needs revision'. Of course I had to run my greatest rival Ganching and she got the same comment as me but 7 points more - 80%.

Then I wondered - how would Charles Dickens score? I copied and pasted a paragraph from 'A Tale of Two Cities' and was astonished to see that he only hit 31% and the comment 'poor - needs revision'. Dickens failed majorly on wordiness - imagine! I then ran a passage from 'Mansfield Park' through. Jane Austen did rather better than Dickens as she scored 61% and got 'weak - needs revision'.

So Final Scores were:

1. Ganching - adequate

2. Nelly - adequate

3. Jane Austen - weak

4. Former Boss - weak

5. Charles Dickens - poor

Our Viewing Pleasure

Bert and I are inundated with DVDs at the moment. I made a small complaint to Lovefilm about the sequencing of Our Mutual Friend and they responded with profuse apologies and extras. I said to Bert,

So tonight we'll watch two episodes of Little Dorrit, then tomorrow we'll watch Chinatown, then back to Deadwood on Monday night. Oh no, wait a bit, we've got another Little Dorrit haven't we?

Sure we've got 18 million fucking Little Dorrits to watch.

He actually likes BBC Dickens serialisations although he will say things like,

Who wrote the novel anyway? Was it Shakespeare or Thomas Hardy?

Is it any wonder that he avoids the brown questions in Trivial Pursuit?

A Desprit Hoor For The Culture

Tonight Bert and I went to Ballymena and found ourselves in an entirely spide-free zone. And it wasn't even a church! We went to see the Lyric Players perform The Beauty Queen of Leenane in The Braid. We thoroughly approved. Sure what else would a body be doing on a Thursday night? Watching The Sopranos and drinking gin? A change is as good as a rest, as they say.

Recently we've been having a fly at Kurosawa's The Idiot. Dem heavy going we thought. We were glad to get back to The Sopranos.

Bert says,

That Tony Soprano's a whingeing bastard.

D'ye think?

Mind you I wouldn't like to tell him that to his face.

Other cultured things I've been doing include listening to Barnaby Rudge. You know, I'd never even heard of the Gordon Riots before! But does listening to audiobooks count? Although I always have the hard copy to hand to properly read parts I sort of missed out on because I saw an interesting bird or the cat did something funny or Bert tried to engage me in conversation.

I've been doing some proper reading too - Flann O'Brien, the Ikea Catalogue and the discusion boards on Lexulous and Wordscraper. Some of the discussions on those last two are a horror movie. I can hardly believe that adults say that sort of stuff to each other. Little wonder they need alter egos.

Off to bed now with a Killer Sudoku and the NME death issue. This culture stuff can be very tiring.

Going In The Right Direction

I parked the car at Steen's Corner and walked half a mile in the direction of Ballymena, before turning right onto the Whappstown Road. For the part of the walk I listened to the last ten minutes of Three Men in a Boat. I found it just a tad flat compared to the previous  chapters but then, after the best part of a fortnight on the river, the three heroes and the dog were feeling a bit flat too. The weather didn't help them as the poor souls were caught in an interminable summer deluge and they just wanted to be home and dry and clean and to be eating a fine  dinner. You know how it is. So my pace was only at a moderately brisk dander, as I concentrated on the book's ending, and was only enlivened by a quick dash into a field for a pee.

Book over I switched the iPod on to shuffle and soon sharpened my pace.

• All Your Love, Magic Sam - good brisk pace, I really lengthened those strides.
  
• Smells Like...Remix, Fatboy Slim - got the heart going good altho' I thought the track was shite.
  
• Bit of Snooks Eaglin - stepping out well.
  
• In The Mood, John Lee Hooker - does what it says on the tin. Did he mean aerobic walking?
  
• Going in the Right Direction, Robert Randolph & the Family Band - I was practically jogging to this.
  
• Wheels, Come On Gang - a spring in my quickstep and a good mood enhancer to boot.
  
• Her Mind Is Gone, Professor Longhair - getting close to the car. Winding down the speed.
  

Best walk I've had in ages. 

The Dog Fight

Jerome K. Jerome and his dog, surely an inspiration for Montmorency in Three Men in a Boat. So how come no one has ever told me how delightful this book is? My favourite passage is as follows:

Fox-terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs are, and it will take years and years of patient effort on the part of us Christians to bring about any appreciable reformation in the rowdiness of the fox-terrier nature. I remember being in the lobby of the Haymarket Stores one day, and all round about me were dogs, waiting for the return of their owners, who were shopping inside. There were a mastiff, and one or two collies, and a St. Bernard, a few retrievers and Newfoundlands, a boar-hound, a French poodle, with plenty of hair round its head, but mangy about the middle; a bull-dog, a few Lowther Arcade sort of animals, about the size of rats, and a couple of Yorkshire tykes. There they sat, patient, good, and thoughtful. A solemn peacefulness seemed to reign in that lobby. An air of calmness and resignation - of gentle sadness pervaded the room. Then a sweet young lady entered, leading a meek-looking little fox-terrier, and left him, chained up there, between the bull-dog and the poodle. He sat and looked about him for a minute. Then he cast up his eyes to the ceiling, and seemed, judging from his expression, to be thinking of his mother. Then he yawned. Then he looked round at the other dogs, all silent, grave, and dignified. He looked at the bull-dog, sleeping dreamlessly on his right. He looked at the poodle, erect and haughty, on his left. Then, without a word of warning, without the shadow of a provocation, he bit that poodle's near fore-leg, and a yelp of agony rang through the quiet shades of that lobby. The result of his first experiment seemed highly satisfactory to him, and he determined to go on and make things lively all round. He sprang over the poodle and vigorously attacked a collie, and the collie woke up, and immediately commenced a fierce and noisy contest with the poodle. Then Foxey came back to his own place, and caught the bull-dog by the ear, and tried to throw him away; and the bull-dog, a curiously impartial animal, went for everything he could reach, including the hall-porter, which gave that dear little terrier the opportunity to enjoy an uninterrupted fight of his own with an equally willing Yorkshire tyke. Anyone who knows canine nature need hardly, be told that, by this time, all the other dogs in the place were fighting as if their hearths and homes depended on the fray. The big dogs fought each other indiscriminately; and the little dogs fought among themselves, and filled up their spare time by biting the legs of the big dogs. The whole lobby was a perfect pandemonium, and the din was terrific. A crowd assembled outside in the Haymarket, and asked if it was a vestry meeting; or, if not, who was being murdered, and why? Men came with poles and ropes, and tried to separate the dogs, and the police were sent for. And in the midst of the riot that sweet young lady returned, and snatched up that sweet little dog of hers (he had laid the tyke up for a month, and had on the expression, now, of a new-born lamb) into her arms, and kissed him, and asked him if he was killed, and what those great nasty brutes of dogs had been doing to him; and he nestled up against her, and gazed up into her face with a look that seemed to say: "Oh, I'm so glad you've come to take me away from this disgraceful scene!" She said that the people at the Stores had no right to allow great savage things like those other dogs to be put with respectable people's dogs, and that she had a great mind to summon somebody. Such is the nature of fox-terriers; (Three Men In A Boat, to say nothing of the dog, CHAPTER XIII.)

The Wisdom of Satan and other Stories

Since I acquired my new fangled listening device I have had those kind LibriVox people read me the following books,

• Middlemarch by George Eliot
  
• Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  
• The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
  
• The Mysterious Stranger and Other Tales by Mark Twain (Paine version)
  

And I am currently listening to The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame. That is a re-read but it's always enjoyable. I was reminded of a thought that I had when I read it first, and it was this - how come Ratty and Toad and Badger and the rest of them get to eat interesting food, go on caravan holidays and have houses and cars and furniture and stuff while other animals, such as the old grey horse has to drag Toad's canary-coloured cart, only gets to eat grass and lives in a paddock? Maybe that's where Orwell got his idea for 'All animals are equal...' Or maybe not.

I finished 'The Mysterious Stranger' yesterday. I was hanging out the washing when Satan was opining thus,

In five or six thousand years five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people.

Satan was speaking in the late 16th century, Twain writing at the turn of the twentieth. How we have moved on since then.

Something To Think About

I picked up an old book recently entitled Modern English Short Stories. The writing may have been modern back in the 1930s but not so much now. I found this story by Mary Webb (Gone To Earth, Precious Bane) very moving and thought-provoking. I keep coming back to it when I feel negative and scared about Pearlie coming to live with us.