Headline from the Irish Times during the week: “Xilinx records Nasdaq gains.”
Reading etc.
Book club
Me: Would you like to read…let me see, I still think you’re too small for the Narnia books, “The Railway Children” is a bit hard as is “A Little Princess”…
Her: Oh “A Little Princess” is that the one with Sara and her slave Becky?
Me: Um, yes, and the nice family.
Her: And they call her the-little-girl-who-is-not-a-beggar.
Me: Yes!
Her: And she has a French lesson and she can already speak French.
Me: Yes, yes and there’s Lottie and the mean headmistress.
Her: Miss Munchkin.
Me: Um, I think that’s Miss Minchin but YES.
Her: And she is sent to live in the attic.
Me: And it’s so sad, her father dies and they are so mean to her (my eyes start to water at the thought of the many cruelties imposed on brave little Sara).
Her: Don’t cry Mummy, it all turns out well in the end. [Pause] Although her father is still dead.
The under-7s are a bit heartless aren’t they?
My new motto
Apparently the Norwegians say “There is no bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.”
I think that this might get us through the winter.
Mr. Waffle says that before I apply this, we should invest in appropriate clothing.
Font News
I was alerted by Eoin to “Typography for Lawyers“. And wordles too, but that’s incidental (I just mention it here because I thought you would like to know).
I now find myself looking at books to see what font they are set in.
And now, Jon has a post about how to create your own font. The excitement.
Whatcha think?
It’s harder than you might imagine.
Is it all getting a bit weird over here?
English as she is spoken
I am very fond of Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s books which provide delightful rhymes for the children and plenty of pictorial interest for the parents who end up reading and re-reading.
One of their books is “The Cops and the Robbers”. The following lines appear “there are toys going missing galore/what they need’s the strong arm of the law”. Under no circumstances in Irish English do galore and law rhyme. Then one of the robbers gets thrown “whoosh/into a bush”. Irish people pronounce the h in whoosh/who/which and so on. For us whoosh and bush do not rhyme.
That is all.
Women in pyjamas
There was a very annoyed woman writing in the Irish Times a while back about funding for equality measures. The tone of the article is, perhaps, a mistake in the current climate. Nevertheless, I was absolutely amazed by the levels of vitriol of almost all of the (overwhelmingly male) commenters. A little bit chilling.