Yesterday we had an amazingly clear rainbow. And it happened at just the right time of day (4:20pm) that the sun was in just the right place that I was able to step back from the house and frame it… | Continue reading
I am writing a Jest/RTL test for a React component that invokes another component. I want to mock that second component so I can have it do things like invoking callbacks that the first component p… | Continue reading
[This is part two in a series — you should read part 1 first for context and then you might go on to part 3.] The Dublin Core — metadata made dumb Just when librarians were in despair o… | Continue reading
SITH DICRIPTION I, Darth trilon am a Sith. A Sith is a Jedi who has found the true sorce to powor. A siths primary hand weapen is a Light Saber like a Jedi. Unlike a Jedi we are evil. A Jedi Trusts… | Continue reading
Fiona and I both love the sunshine, and it’s something you don’t necessarily get a lot of in Britain. We’ve often thought that if we had the money we’d love to add a conserv… | Continue reading
An interesting thing happened. A few days ago, I made pizza dough for four pizzas, as usual. Generally, I do one each for Fiona, Jonno and me, and put the spare ball in an airtight plastic tub in t… | Continue reading
Emma — Jane Austen I usually think of this as my second favourite Austen (after Pride and Prejudice, naturally), but on my re-read of all six, I found to my surprise that I didn’t enjoy… | Continue reading
Have I got good news for you! First: the following albums, released in 1983, are as close to WWII as to the present day: Billy Joel: An Innocent ManPolice: SynchronicityMarillion: Script for a Jest… | Continue reading
Three years ago, I posted about an early 1990s heavy metal band, Metal Jester, whose singer Richard Whitbread had also been our singer in Anne Heap of Frogs. Since then, I’ve heard from Simon… | Continue reading
Rather belatedly … Here is a YouTube playlist of my now-traditional top-ten list of the albums I’ve listened to the most in the previous calendar year. (See this list of previous entries.) I … | Continue reading
However much I might lament the inexorable downward trend of everything that was once bright and good about my country, I was born an Englisshman and am still one today — which means I drink a lot … | Continue reading
If I Never Met You — Mhairi McFarlane This is is my fourth McFarlane book. (Previously: You Had Me At Hello, It’s Not Me, It’s You, Here’s Looking at You). She continues to impress and deligh… | Continue reading
It wasn’t until my 2007 trip to Oklahoma that I realised the food called “barbecue” in the USA bears no relation to the charred-on-the-outside, raw-on-the-inside sausages that bea… | Continue reading
On Monday last week, I made pizza from scratch for the whole family: but because it’s hard to separate a mass of dough out into five equal parts, I made enough for six pizzas, and saved the l… | Continue reading
Let’s see what G. K. Chesterton has to say about Boris Johnson and the rest of our clownish government. I read yesterday a sentence which should be written in letters of gold and adamant; it … | Continue reading
Today I read — a little behind the curve — that Richard Sharp, who the Tory government recently appointed as BBC chairman — has donated £416,189 to the Tory party since the turn of the millennium. … | Continue reading
Well, I blinked, and the best part of two years passed since the fourth and penultimate part in my series about The Incredible Hulk. (See also part 1, part 2 and part 3). For this concluding post I… | Continue reading
Back on 12 December last year, we had a spectacular rainbow out behind the house — so clear it felt you could reach out and touch it. Here’s a photo of it that I took on my phone, completely … | Continue reading
“Lockdowns don’t work!” Sorry, reality disagrees. This graph shows Covid-19 infection rates from the Government’s data as of today. I have superimposed pink boxes showing th… | Continue reading
As the final, definitive break the the European Union approaches — the transition period that has shielded us from most of the implications of Brexit ends in 16 days — we’re starting to see h… | Continue reading
I recorded this song for a Christmas event at my church. It was written by Graham Kendrick, who is best known for congegational worship songs of 1980s that have not necessarily aged very well; but … | Continue reading
Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen I’m making my way once more through all six of Austen’s completed novels, and was interested to see how this one would hold up. Although published p… | Continue reading
In the last few weeks I’ve had a horrible and debilitating attack of arthritis, so extreme that for several days I was physically unable to leave my bedroom. It also fogged my brain so I was … | Continue reading
I recently learned that Pink Floyd played a gig in my home town, a little under a year before I was born (on 12th March 1968): It’s a strange thought. I am 52 years old. Pink Floyd are even o… | Continue reading
We live in a content-saturated world. It took me a long while to get used to the idea that books are now easy enough to source that I can start one, decide I don’t like it, and just give up. … | Continue reading
A while back, I signed a government petition, “Review the need for a statutory owners and Directors Test in Football”. As a result, I got an email today: The Petitions Committee would l… | Continue reading
Monday’s little diatribe on git seemed to stir up quite a bit of strong opinion, both agreeing with me and disagreeing. As is often the case, they two camps seem to be split about 50-50, whi… | Continue reading
I don’t honestly even like moussaka much. By my wife loves it (and aubergines more generally), so a while back (pre-lockdown) she ordered it in a supposed Greek restaurant, only to find that … | Continue reading
Tremendous Trifles — G. K. Chesterton One of the better ways to approach Chesterton is through a collection like this one, consisting of 30 or 40 or so short, self-contained pieces in which h… | Continue reading
These are very much better than anything you get in a shop. They are really simple to make. Here’s how. | Continue reading
I didn’t think to get a photo before I’d eaten a good chunk of it: But here is last night’s pizza — one of three that I made. Fiona’s was topped with olives and anchov… | Continue reading
Thanks to a tweet (in Spanish!) from Zona Fi, I have learned of not one but two series of adventure games being written in my toolkits for building Scott Adams-format adventure games! The first is … | Continue reading
Visit the post for more. | Continue reading
High Society — Ben Elton Elton doing what he does best, colliding a cast of somewhat stereotypical characters (the corrupt politician, the drugged-out singing star, the teenage runaway) and w… | Continue reading
Different Doctor Who fans have responded in different ways to the shallow disappointment that is the Chibnall/Whittaker era. I have reluctantly written something about each episode, despite activel… | Continue reading
This is a recipe adapted from one that mygood friend Charles Ledvina gave me. I have only made it once — to good effect — so I am blogging this mostly so that I have an easy way to find it. If you … | Continue reading
The Magician’s Nephew — C. S. Lewis I don’t quite remember what the specific stimulus was for my starting to re-re-re-read Lewis’s classic Narnia books. But this must be at … | Continue reading
Now that we’re in lockdown, and it’s difficult to get food delivered, we’ve become more careful about making the best use of all our leftovers. In particular, when we have left-ov… | Continue reading
I don’t know what to call this curry: it’s sort of like a dupiaza, sort of like a jalfrezi. The key point is, it’s delicious. And the great thing about it is that the first 80% or… | Continue reading
Wintersmith — Terry Pratchett Towards the end of his career — and Wintersmith is the 41st of the 47 Discworld books — it seems to me that Terry Pratchett’s heart was really in the Tiffa… | Continue reading
Let’s start with the big-picture stuff. The Timeless Children was fun to watch, but more than that: fascinating. It’s full of interesting ideas, and they all pretty much make sense. The… | Continue reading
It feels to me that this series is gearing up to be much stronger than series 11, and this penultimate episode does a fine job of setting the stage for the finale. I like that we’re left with… | Continue reading
I feel like the ingredients are all there in this episode, but the somehow they spend most of the episode just sitting there. We have a cast of interesting historical characters in a web of ambiguo… | Continue reading
It was interesting seeing this one so soon after Praxeus. Like the earlier episode, Can You Hear Me? begins with a sequence of apparently disconnected vignettes — this time, monsters in Aleppo in 1… | Continue reading
My eldest son, Daniel, just turned 22. Sushi is his favourite food, but of course we couldn’t take him to a restaurant during the Coronavirus crisis — and even in peacetime, the nearest good … | Continue reading
Dire Straits’ third album, Making Movies, has a stellar side one: Tunnel of Love, Romeo and Juliet, Skateaway. Only three songs, but all of them stone-cold classis, using their extended runni… | Continue reading
I’m fond of the old WWII slogan Keep Calm and Carry On. It’s not just that it captures something appealingly British (yes, there are still appealing aspects to the stereotypically Briti… | Continue reading
The fundamental problem of politics is this: The skills you need to get elected to government are completely different from the skills you need to govern effectively. So we elect people who have on… | Continue reading