insidecolinshead

“Revisionists challenge D-Day story” was the BBC News headline. With BBC News’s overscrupulous attention to balance, I did wonder whether this was a link to people claiming that the Normandy landings never happened and that the number of deaths of Axis soldiers was an overestimate and in any case it was disease rather than Allied bullets that finished them off.

Every household has, somewhere very close to 100 Carols for Choirs, a vocal score of Handel’s Messiah (source: Office for National Statistics, 2007). Except this one. Until just now when I opened an A4 book very close to 100 Carols for Choirs, wrapped in black paper like a school textbook.

O thou that tellest good tidings to Jerusalem

it said. Aha.

I’m willing to lay a small amount of money that if Jack Straw had brought in STV for the European Parliament rather than the system he’s lumbered us with, the results of the forthcoming European elections would involve no BNP MEPs. The second and third preferences are going to have to be guessed based on a poll a few years ago which showed that people whose first preference was not the BNP wouldn’t have it as a second or third preference, but still.

I have a memory of Carol Ann Duffy presenting Poetry Please! about two decades ago, which can’t be right because that radio programme is the wedding disco of poetry.

But. When I saw a headline “Duffy to be new Poet Laureate” I immediately thought it was a brave choice to pick someone so young who didn’t write all her own material. Oh.

Thanks to regular commenter HTFB for reminding me of this.

—Mr Obama, do you and your administration preserve food by sealing it in metal cylinders? (more…)

… tells you, as in evenemäng, bassäng and poäng, that something is borrowed from the French.

Nonetheless it took me ages to work out that fåfäng was in fact faux-fin, which .fr disavows all knowledge of.

I can’t work out how to get non-ISO-8859-1 characters into this proprietary MP3 manager, in which I am sorting Gracenote’s mangling of Jenůfa.

I can more or less do without, except the opera ends up with a character called Stevo.

Can’t come as thee up at moment.

Have you ever watched somebody else, maybe on a bus, key a text message? It’s fascinating. People who can’t do it very quickly are even slower than they should be because they don’t drop articles or pronouns. Mind you, T9 helpfully puts in pronouns where I wanted some other part of speech.

One in five parents could miss out on first-choice schools

Parents shouldn’t be going to schools. No wonder the classrooms are so crowded. It gets worse.

In Kensington and Chelsea and Richmond in west London nearly four in 10 people will not get their first choice of school this year.

I make that 135 600 people, give or take.

The other day I saw the corpse of a moorhen. It had been in an RTA.

Normally they look dowdy with only a rabbit tail feather to relieve the brown, but this one was oddly iridescent. It looked more like the kind of exotic gallinule you wouldn’t see here, I think mainly because of its posture, like dead mallards with their wings splayed, which are huge.