I don’t know how Eastenders had the nerve to try a half-hour monologue. You need nigh-on perfect acting and continually interesting writing for something like that, and using one of the more two-dimensional characters is a huge risk. They pulled it off, though. Best soap episode in ages.

After replacing a laptop hard drive yesterday I discovered the keyboard had a broken key. I couldn’t fix it, and the client preferred to work around it than buy a not-cheap replacement, so I looked for a program to remap the keyboard. Turns out there’s a tool in the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit. I installed it and grabbed remapkey.exe from the directory - it seems to work independently. The GUI is a bit odd, but I was able to swap the broken key for something less common (does anyone use ` ?). remapkey alters the registry, so there’s no need for startup programs. Not useful very often, but invaluable when needed.

My seventh non-murder mystery, The Sizzling Case of the Soccer Saboteur, is now online and for sale at Kids Mysteries. This one’s all-girl and has eight characters. Here’s the editor’s blurb:

The rolling cheer of a wave ripples around the stadium and the scent of hot dogs and burgers fills the air. It’s the finals of the All-Girl Starling Cup Soccer Championship - and it’s a sell-out! Many in the crowd have traveled hundreds of miles to watch the most-anticipated game of the year. The Rolling Hills Bluebirds are playing the Seashell Cove Wildcats, and the winners will be the State Champs! The sky is blue, the sun is shining, and everybody’s looking forward to a great game. But things are about to go terribly wrong.

The teams run out to wild applause. It’s tradition for the team captains to shake hands before the game starts. Bluebirds captain Rebecca Goodkicks and Wildcats captain Victoria Smee jog onto the field to roars from the crowd. They go to the center to shake hands, but before they reach each other, Rebecca starts slowing down. She looks uncomfortable. What’s going on? A few moments later she turns and runs back into the locker room! Is she limping? What’s happening?

A few minutes later, Ella Galaxy, the booth announcer, relays the news that the game will be delayed, and groans are heard from everyone. Rebecca’s soccer shoes have been sabotaged with Red Hot Itching Powder! Rebecca needs some time to recover. The Bluebirds coach, Ivana Winalot, is refusing to let her girls play until the mystery is solved and the culprit is found.

The crowd is getting restless. Everybody wants the game to begin. The guilty party must be brought to justice. The local police proclaim the game will be delayed until the case is solved. Everyone has been deputized and is ordered to help find the culprit.

It’s described as a new mystery “from popular kids mystery writer Andrew West”. This makes me absurdly happy.

What’s with BBC News going all BNP over ‘foreign-born mothers’?! It was all over the Ten O’Clock News, too. It’s costing £200m a year more than a decade ago, apparently, and in 2006 over 20% of births were to ‘foreign-born mothers’. Oh no! How terrible! Let’s tell immigrants they can’t have children, or deny pregnant women visas, or something. It’s our NHS, we don’t want any dirty immigrants using it, especially to have evil immigrant babies.

The real story seems to be that the NHS isn’t coping as well as it should with high numbers of births. But the emphasis is on immigrants, and how evil they are for having children. Weird. Maybe it’ll make sense in the morning.

Last night’s Watchdog exposed a bogus psychic, then promptly rendered their report inert. The woman diagnosed ‘cracked auras’ at every appointment, and recommended various treatments including an £800 candle. Watchdog Reporter Guy had her come around to his house for a reading, then brought in the cameras and asked her how she could justify recommending he pay nearly £2000 for his aura repair and associated ‘claptrap’. She didn’t say much.

Cut back to the studio and presenter Julia Bradbury spoke to Office of Fair Trading Guy. He did quite well. She didn’t:

of course there are genuine psychics out there as well, so what are the tell-tale signs [of ‘bogus psychics]?

Watchdog thinks there are genuine psychics out there. Watchdog. Office of Fair Trading Guy emphasised that every time they’ve tracked down psychics there’s never anything genuine, and reading between the lines I think his personal position is fairly clear. But she pressed him for advice on how to avoid being duped, and his only real response was that psychics who try to scare you into readings aren’t to be trusted.

So Watchdog’s advice is that nasty psychics are probably scamming you. Nice ones, though, are fine and dandy and you can feel free to give them money if you want. Watchdog, supposed champion of the consumer, isn’t prepared to say that psychics are ripping you off. Rubbish.

Originally found via Harry’s Place. I caught the relevant section on the iPlayer.

I’ve been roughly following the US elections, but I probably know more about the opinions of the frankly laughable¹ Republican candidates than I do the Democratic frontrunners. But, via Martin in the Margins, I now know Barack Obama can give a good speech:

He has a little of the Matthew Santos² about him, don’t you think? He’s apparently great on tech issues, too.

1. unless one of them gets elected, which wouldn’t be at all funny [↩]
2. West Wing S6+7 spoilers [↩]

I’m doing a puzzle where you have to find the word linking three others, for example ‘house’, ’sky’ and ‘weight’ are linked by ‘light’. Sometimes I can get a word linking two of the three, but I don’t know whether the remaining concatenation is nonsensical and I’m therefore wrong, or it’s just something I haven’t heard of. I started thinking about ‘on’, ‘tail’, and ‘wool’:

On, tail and wool…Ooh, cotton. Cotton wool, cotton tail! That must be it. On cotton? Why’s there always one I don’t understand? I wonder whether it’s just a badly made quiz. This seems to happen quite a lot. I…oh.

I suppose that’s a little irony, right there.

Our major digital photography project this term is, roughly speaking, to create images that require a second look. The above is an idea I was playing around with this evening. Something for the workbook, anyway.

From a uni email telling me about the chaplaincy:

We have found that it is more inclusive to send send bulk messages rather than to our opt-in list so please delete this message if it is of no interest.  Thank you.

Well, yes. That’s what ‘inclusive’ means. The whole sentence works better if you say it like the aliens from Galaxy Quest.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been making a concerted effort to finish The Language Instinct. It’s not the kind of book I can read casually. I often have to read sections multiple times, and with each chapter being an essay around a single topic it’s necessary to read regularly to keep the local and overall structures clear in my brain.

Completely worth the effort. It’s a fascinating journey through the workings of language, and how our brains come pre-wired to understand complex rules from basic structures that apply to all languages. He goes on to explain how natural selection may have crafted such an ability, and details the first understandings of how it may be built into the brain. I’d love to read a second edition, as I suspect much has been discovered in the thirteen years since its publication¹².

But I’ve just hit the penultimate chapter, where Steven Pinker takes time out to lay into the ‘English teachers, essayists, columnists and pundits’ (amongst others) who try to legislate ‘correct English’. It’s glorious. He calls them the ‘language mavens’: those who tell us not to split infinitives or end sentences with prepositions, and despair over the decline of the language in teenage slang, grammatical errors in adverts, etc.

This chapter was a revelation, but not because of any schadenfreude. I’ve been that person. It turns out that many of the prescriptive rules I’ve been known to try and impose ‘make no sense on any level’:

For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century. All the best English writers at all periods, including Shakespeare and most of the mavens themselves, have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic nor to tradition, and if were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all. Indeed, most of the “ignorant errors” these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language to which the mavens are oblivious.

His reasoning isn’t simply ‘language evolves and we should with it’, it’s a logical examination of the underlying structure that finds the rules wanting. 18th century scholars decided we shouldn’t split infinitives to make English more like the ’superior’ Latin. But Latin infinitives are one word and inherently unsplittable. English is a different kind of language, ‘building sentences around many simple words instead of a few complex ones’, and infinitives are two words: to go / to jump / to splat. There’s no reason not to slip an adverb in there. ‘To boldly go’ is no less clear than ‘to go boldly’.

But the most surprising and unexpected section was an analysis of the “‘misuse’ of pronoun case inside conjunctions”. Or, was Bill Clinton wrong to say ‘Give Al Gore and I a chance’?

I know this one. I can do it. I first learnt the quick rule about removing the other player and keeping the pronoun: get rid of Al Gore from the sentence and it’d be ‘Give me a chance’, therefore the correct phrase is ‘Give Al Gore and me a chance’. I later figured out how to recognise subjects and objects in a sentence, and can usually manage it on the fly, providing the structure isn’t too complex. A chance is being given to Al Gore and me. Therefore Al Gore and I are the objects of the sentence. The first-person object pronoun is ‘me’ - ‘I’ is the first-person subject pronoun. I know this one.

Total bollocks.

‘Al Gore and I’ is a conjunction. So is ‘He and Bob’. Individually, you’d write ‘He is’ and ‘Bob is’, but put them together and you obviously get ‘He and Bob are’. But look: ‘are’ refers to a plural, yet ‘He’ and ‘Bob’ are singular - they only become plural when together in the conjunction, which is treated as a unit on its own. But if the items inside a conjunction don’t need to match with the grammatical number, why should they have to match with the subject/object? It’s the conjunction that’s the subject or object, not the items within it - ‘Al Gore and I’ is the object of the ‘Give Al Gore and I a chance’ sentence, and it’s self-contained. There’s no reason why the ‘I’ should change, any more than ‘He and Bob are’ should become ‘He’s and Bob’s are’³. There’s actually no rule of language which says what case the parts of the conjunction should have, and furthermore:

The linguist Joseph Edmonds has analyzed the Me and Jennifer / Between you and I phenomenon in great technical detail. He concludes that the language that the mavens want us to speak is not only not English, it is not a possible human language!

Gotta get hold of that.

He goes on to demonstrate why ‘hopefully’ can be used in any bloody way you want, and there are plenty more. It all surprised the hell out of me. Grammatical rules fall out of the innate language structures in our brains, and humans are very, very good at obeying them. Nobody says ‘Give I a chance’ or ‘Me is leaving’. It’s not that people don’t make mistakes, but it’s usually for good reasons such as not knowing the irregular verb form. Writing is a whole different skillset, but in speech many mistakes are due to higher-pressure situations, which is why the Plain English Campaign making fun of spoken phrases is pretty stupid.

It’s close to a general statement: when it comes to spoken language, any rules you need to have drilled into you are probably wrong, and those who would force change don’t understand why. Prescriptive linguistic folklore turns out to be no different from urban folklore, and professional linguists are the Snopes.com of the language world⁴.

The whole chapter is (officially) available online, and definitely worth a look.

1. including a possible exception to the universal grammar [↩]
2. I’ve just discovered there’s a 2007 edition. Want. [↩]
3. ”He’s” looks weird, but I think this makes sense. Admittedly Prof. Pinker didn’t put it like this. [↩]
4. although he admits they’ve been terrible in this regard [↩]

Yesterday I was called out to look at a computer suddenly ‘being slow’. A few minutes of playing revealed it was pausing for 10 seconds every time I switched to Word from another window. This disappeared in Office Safe Mode, so my first thought was a rogue plugin. The Word and COM add-in lists were empty, but latter was too empty. You get to know how Microsoft UIs are constructed, and this just didn’t seem to have enough information. I decided that whatever plugin was slowing everything down had also broken the add-in list.

This threw up a bit of a problem - how do you view Office plugins from outside Office? I was struggling until I found OfficeIns. It’s a small utility that displays all installed Office plugins, and lets you enable / disable them as well as view their registry keys. Exactly what I needed. OfficeIns revealed the offending program, and disabling it solved the problem¹. Took about 30 seconds once I found the utility, so I thought I’d promote it.

This didn’t actually get the COM list working again, so I’m not sure whether my initial theory was correct. The broken install could have caused confusion that disabling the plugin didn’t fix, or maybe there are other types of plugin, viewable elsewhere. They needed the computer back so I didn’t have time to investigate properly, but I’d guess it’s the former and a repair install would do the trick, should there ever be the need.

1. well, there were actually two copies of the same plugin, one only displaying partial info. I figured the latter must be a broken install and nuked its reg keys, which fixed it [↩]

I have been watching BBC1’s ‘Mistresses’ for the past few weeks. It’s quite good, but has unexpectedly brought out the backseat psychotherapist in me. Don’t do that! Why would you possibly be attracted to him? That’s clearly a mistake. Ignore him. Now, look, if you do that you know what’s going to happen. You’re just overreacting - she wasn’t saying that at all. DON’T TEXT HIM. Dude, stop being a cretin or your wife will…too late, she did.

Basically, I want all conflict removed from the drama. They seem like such nice people, why can’t they just be happy? Really I just want to watch programmes in which attractive people struggle over a crossword while chatting about mistakes they nearly made.

“Don’t worry about an invoice. You’d have to do things properly then, wouldn’t you.”

I hate this. I hate that the only way out is to give a non-committal answer. I hate that people assume I’m happy to break the law. I hate that people use roads, hospitals, schools, public services and specialists who will rush to your aid 24/7/365, yet don’t have the first clue as to how this happens, or what it’s like elsewhere. But mostly I hate the way they say it.

I’ve a digital photography module this term - YAY - and it’s going to involve some fairly intensive training in Photoshop CS2. I know my way around photo editing programs generally, but I’m sure there are plenty of gaps and I’m looking forward to having a professional around to show me what I’m doing wrong. The university has suites of Macs and high-end printers, but as they’re two hours away I think it’s sensible to get hold of Photoshop at home.

The student version of CS3 is £140, and while waiting to afford that I figured I’d download the 30-day trial. I picked up an enormous tutorial book from the library so I could have a play around, and promptly discovered that I already installed the trial last year. My 30 days are up, so I can’t get in.

I know I can get around this by reinstalling Windows; there must therefore be something somewhere I can delete to reset the 30 days. Obviously Adobe make this difficult so people can’t use the program indefinitely, which is fair enough. I could use a keygen and (illegally) unlock the trial to the full version but I have too much respect for my computer to start messing around with warez stuff. And I don’t want to feel like I’m ripping anybody off. 30 days is more than reasonable…I just need them again

Not a big worry, in the grand scheme of things. Little frustrating, though. I’ll try to install it on my parents’ laptop instead. I can only steal that a couple of times a week, but it’s more powerful than my home computer anyway…

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith told the Sunday Times she wouldn’t feel safe walking alone at night in her area of London. In the past few hours I have heard this described as:

1. Correct. It’s a warzone, and here’s an anecdote to prove it.
2. Incorrect. London’s streets are completely safe, and here’s an anecdote to prove it.
3. ‘Feeding a culture of fear’.
4. A major gaffe - what’s the Home Secretary doing admitting that the streets aren’t safe?! (the media might hate ’spin’, but if you don’t use it you’re apparently a rubbish politician).

How exactly should she have answered that question?