Hello, greetings and welcome to the first of what will hopefully be many roasts from the city of the dreaming spires. If you haven’t been stalking paying attention to what is going on in my life, I got a job! THE job in fact! Not even a week in Oxford and I’ve somehow accomplished what I moved here for. Either the karma gods are paying me back for the past shitty six months, or they want me to enjoy the present because there is something monumentally bad waiting round the corner. I am so overwhelmingly bouncy and in orbit right now, I just hope it doesn’t all come as a great disappointment. It won’t, but still, the practical side of me is muttering warnings.

But joy all the same. Neko said she could hear me smiling down the phone on Friday, I was that happy. It is true that you don’t realise quite uncomfortable you were in a situation till you are out of it. I loved my last job and the people I worked with, but I can accept now that it was time to move on. The environment was not for me. It is nice to be able to go the night through without waking up from a screaming nightmare about something work related. I feel lighter, more relaxed, and more me than I have in a long time. It shows.

I’m acting like a highly caffeinated five year old on a sugar rush, basically! Hence the gruesome over abundance of exclamation points in this post. Once I knew how to craft a sentence to show enthusiasm without resorting to crude markers, but no more. Things will settle down to a more even keel shortly, but for now, please bear with the digustingly high amounts of happiness exuding from this blog, and read the roast I have spent the past few hours writing 🙂

Jason Donovan is making a new album. Dear god above, no! I absolutely adored Jason Donovan when I was younger – in fact, his were the first albums I brought *blush* – but they were very much of their time. Would I want to buy a Donovan album now?! Hell no. I have some pride left.

Um, if anyone gets the album, can they, like, get me a copy…

The Sony Reader came out a short while ago and I must admit, I had a brief moment of gadget lust, but I stopped myself rather easily. Why? I agree with this piece though: it still hasn’t cracked it. On the other hand, I got myself a Nokia E71 on Friday as a way to celebrate getting my job, and I’ve already loaded it with oodles of ebooks from BooksInMyPhone and MobiPocket. Reading them is simple, I can bookmark, easily download new books over wifi or the 3G service, and to top it all, I only have to carry one device (phone, camera, book, email, internet, book…) On that front it is pretty much the ideal ebook reader for me because as a plus, it plays nicely with the Mac.

Community and geographically based, automatically updated internet? Sounds like an amazing idea, so long as it can help me find a place in Oxford that does eyebrow threading!

You think only fools would be caught out by phishing and spam attacks these days, but it can happen to the best of us.

This man is my hero: he invented the kettle thermostat. Yes, there is a sense of romance and history and pleasure to be got from boiling a kettle on a stove, but in the morning when I am still asleep and just want a cuppa, I would far rather flick a switch and doze till it clicks off than wait an eternity for my kettle to whistle and demand removal from the heat before it burns the place down. As I said, the man is my hero.

I love the Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse books – fluff I can read in a single sitting, but enjoyable – so I am pretty keen to see True Blood, from Alan Ball (him of the Six Feet Under credentials). DVD methinks? Unless anyone from Stateside has seen it and tells me it absolutely sucks, but not in a good vampire way…

Rarely have I chortled so much over emoticons… how to be an empowered stalkee (though in mine Bella would also be getting a slap to tell her to stop being so wet and to just go with Jacob already!)

I don’t read many book reviews, preferring to go on recommendations and whatever grabs my eye, but this one has me wanting the book, regardless of it’s less than glowing review. Well, if nothing else I have a booktoken to spend and I think it should be spent on something I wouldn’t normally try.

Top 8 Most Dangerous Animals of 2007 (thanks Neko!)

Another intriguing idea from Harpercollins.

And to finish off for you to enjoy whilst I go for a womble round Jericho, some movie trailers:
Milk
The Haunting of Molly Hartley – I’m not normally a big fan of horror, but this one could be fun on DVD
The Lucky Ones
The Soloist
Frost/Nixon
Repo! The Genetic Opera – so totally surreal, I have to see this!

As you might have gathered from Friday’s post, things have started to pick up in the interesting stakes here at Meadow Towers. Change is in the wind etc, etc, etc. Which, as I expect I have mentioned previously, is exciting and terrifying all at the same time. Don’t expect too much blogging greatness till the dust has settled (middle of September). As is sometimes wont to happen with us personal bloggers, I am busy living my life so I will have something to write about down the way!

I shall warn you now – do NOT expect a Roast on the 14^th or the 21^st of September as those weekends are designated to be Moving Hell. I have a lot less stuff than I previously dreaded, but sill, the prospect of moving all my crap to another city and a much smaller room in the space of one (and a bit) weekends is not something anyone would rightly look forward to. I’m strange, but not that strange!

What to look forward to in this roast? You’re gonna have to read it to find out 😉

According to the Guardian we should all move to Hull by December.

A message in a bottle has been returned to its sender after 23 years. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea and the serendipity of its return, but I am amazed no one has commented on the irony of the bottle being swept onto a beach being cleaned of litter…

Prior to my current imposed dietary revolution, I ate most anything, bar mushrooms. I abhore mushrooms. The taste, the texture, the smell… Ugh! Just the smell of cooking, especially frying, mushrooms is enough to drive me from the room fighting nausea. My fathers way of trying to tempt child-Cas into eating a mushroom (“eat it, it’s only a fungus!”) not only seemed to me a perfectly good reason NOT to eat a mushroom, but became part of family history. Then mushrooms force a plane to land. Always knew no good would come from mushrooms…

Like Rowan, I hate to give up on a book. To me it smacks of failure and giving in, both things I try not to do. But then you get to books that just defeat you – there isn’t a glimmer of anything to make it worth your while, trudging through the morass. Only one book currently sits, glowering at me in its unfinished state from my bookshelves, taunting me for money wasted on its purchase: Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. What books have proven to be your literary nemeses?

Breaking News!!! The moon landings were faked!!!

Doodling is great, I think we all (bar my old English tutor before he realised I was paying attention as well as decorating my exercise book) love a good doodle. So why not share them?

Awesome pictures of the world from space.

British Superheroes – a potentially very funny new TV show (just in time for me not having a TV, sigh)

A few map-related links for my lovely map-geek friends:
Are online maps wiping out history?

The UK in 1940

Interactive maps of historical journeys

Ghost Town – I am NOT a fan of Ricki Gervais, but by the end this had me giggling, reluctantly

Real Time – one hour left to live and Randy Quaid on your case? Scary!

The Secret Life of Bees – potentially yet another in a long line of ‘heartwarming southern family dramas’, but something about the trailer caught me and I really want to see this!

The Brothers Bloom – screwball comedy and a rough-round-the-edges Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody. What more can you want?

(And don’t even waste your time looking for the provenance of this weeks title – Moose succumbed to the lure of bad movies and we watched National Treasure 2 last night. And I even giggled in a few places. Oh dear).

You know, I think I might finally have run out of exciting ways to introduce these Roasts. It has taken over three years of more or less weekly writing, but for the life of me I can think of nothing new and fun to talk about this week. I know I have brilliantly fun plans in the pipeline, but I don’t want to talk about them too much for worry of souring them.

So I am going to get on with this post and hope somewhere along the way I get inspired…

I didn’t start out collecting links this week that concentrate on the visual, but somehow it just ends up that way.

Always knew Google Maps were evil

I’m not a fan of Cow Murderer Federer, but this picture is damn impressive (photo source)

I want!

Possibly one of my favourite photographers in the world

Followed swiftly by another favourite

I haven’t been following the Olympic games much (bar Moose’s regular updates on how my baby Nadal is doing in the tennis), but this images are hilarious! Pictures 8 and 11 had me totally creased over when I saw them at work.

Looking at my groaning bookshelves, I hate to think how much I spend each year on books. Add to that it is not unusual for me to get through 6 books a week, and you have me blessing the fact our local libraries are rather good, just round the corner and open till late! Whilst I frantically pray Oxford is similarly blessed with decent public libraries a short walk from wherever I end up living, how do you balance your book budget?

Only the Norwegian’s could have a penguin as their Colonel-in-Chief (and no fewer than four people independently emailed me this story at work on Friday – hugs to all of you for knowing me so well 🙂 )

I want to be able to pass this story off with a jokey “only in America”, but it is genuinely freaking me out too much to find it even mildly diverting – a Texas school is letting teachers carry guns in classrooms. WHO in their right minds could possibly think having more guns around kids is a good idea? Picture me sitting here in baffled incomprehension.

What Just Happened? – if only for the bearded, fat Bruce Willis

Max Payne – I expect this comes from some comic/graphic novel I have never heard of, but this trailer excited me more than I would expect a simple revenge/shoot-em-up too. I think it is the flashes of wings that promise something much, much weirder

High School Musical 3 – and with this admission, I hear by resign any claim I ever had to even a smidgeon of cool. Yes, I watched both HSM1 and 2 and I plan to watch 3 when it comes out on DVD. Yes, I know I am 26 in a month. Yes, there is very little you can say to me that Moose hasn’t already mocked me with.

Now I am off to hide in embarrassment till it is time to go round to Neko’s to be looked after 😀

Before you ask, no I am not going to tell you how the job interview went. It went, leave it at that. Job interviews, like exams, are things I am notoriously bad at judging. I think I’ve done awfully and I pass with flying colours; conversely, I think I have done well and I crash and burn spectacularly! I will find out when I find out and then I will make whatever decisions that need to be made.

(To tell you the truth, I am all excited and looking forward to the next adventures that await come the middle of September. Scared witless, but excited).

Looks like this week is Movie Week here at Meadow Towers. *rubs hands together in glee* Lots of lovely, yummy movies to look forward to down the bottom of the roast. There are also a few other things that have grabbed my attention round the net this week, so read on…

For Neko

I can’t think of a good intro to this, other than it is a damn gorgeous photograph: Bubblicious

Possibly my favourite tumblr entry ever

Some random thoughts on ebooks – there are some interesting points in there, mainly about the pricing. I want an ebook reader, I really do. I’ve started rereading The Baroque Cycle by Stephenson. Brilliant books, but at over 900 pages each, even the paperback versions are a trial to read with my wrists at the moment. A nice, portable ebook version? Bliss and would have kept me occupied on this weeks mammoth train journey!

As Moose said when she sent me the link, nooooooooooooooo!!!!!!

Continuing our conversation about bees and the perils of honey farming, Himalayan bees with 3 meter nests!

And those movies I promised:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – spine tinglingly evil and dark. Love it 😀

Death Race – so I like me a bit of Jason Stratham, plus the whole thing is one big car chase with lots of explosions. What’s not to like? (Yes, I am your dream girlfriend right now, aren’t I? 😉 )

Rachel Getting Married – DVD material, but intriguing

The Spirit – I am so conflicted over this movie! It looks like it is going to be mindblowing visually, but is that enough to make a decent movie?

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist – a bit of light candy floss for the mind. Again a DVD when the library has their 2-4-1 offer.

Madagascar Escape 2 Africa – thank you for flying penguin air

Ballet Shoes – this was on the TV last christmas here in the UK, and it is a really sweet adaptation of the book. Well worth it. I can even (almost) forgive the one major deviation from the book as it does make for a more modern happy film. Maybe.

Babylon AD – the teaser I saw for this a few months ago was better, but this still looks like it could be fun. See my afore mentioned comments re Death Race and apply them also to Vin Diesel and this film…

OMG! It’s Cas! See that cute girl drinking a cup of tea in the header of the blog? That is me, and I am writing a roast. May this herald the return to the greatness that in the past typified this blog. I have ideas for posts, I have the desire to write, I have wrists that aren’t too bad so I actually can write… Now all we need are all you lovely readers to forgive the recent less-than-stellar service and return to the comments, and things will be back to how we all love them to be. Pretty please with sugary sprinkles on top?

This week I have cute lion cubs, time travelers, crime-solving bees, Katie Price, Kevin Bacon and a film called “Sex Drive”. Don’t believe me, read on gentle readers, read on…

An interesting piece on the BBC, putatively about the accents of recent Dr Who stars, but really about perceptions of differing accents, got me to thinking on accents myself. (I actually prefer both John Barrowman and David Tennant when they use their native Scots). I have an unfortunate, and unconscious, habit of adopting certain aspects of peoples speech patterns if I hang around them for a while. I once spent a week on a boat with a group of Irish men and by the end of it I sounded like I was taking the piss with my faux-Irish brogue. I can’t help it, it just happens! (Alternatively, I can go the other way – when I was in New York last, people kept asking me to “sound British” and I have never sounded more like I had a silver spoon shoved where the sun don’t shine!) So what is my “true” accent if it changes so readily? Surely nationality is more about where you grew up and where your roots are than how you actually sound?

As someone with recently discovered and still emerging food sensitivities and allergies, I am finding shopping for food now costs twice as much and takes three times as long as it used to. No longer can I just pick my staples off the shelves, ram a few cakes in the basket as treats, and be out the door in 15 minutes flat. Now every label needs to be carefully looked over. Want a beefburger or sausage? Even lots of the high quality ones have wheat. You would be surprised and, perhaps horrified, to realise the amount of products dairy gets into. Add to that colourings, preservatives and flavourings, and you would forgive me my dream of having essential nutrients via a pill and doing away with eating all together. Breakfast is the latest in my fight to get my diet including more than one item of food. Oatcakes are starting to pall after four solid months! But, again, even the speciality stuff tends to have at least one naughty item lurking in the midst of the ingredient list. Or just looks so boring as to make oatcakes appealing again. So pick-n-mix muesli sounds like a great idea. Just look at all the ingredients you can choose from! Moose makes her own, kudos to her, but the preparation time just irritates me. Plus I’d probably get bored half-way through a batch. I might be willing to pay the extra for the convenience… (For the record I am currently chomping through spelt-pops, with a satsuma on top, and a dollup of goats yoghurt and honey).

Bumblebees used in hunting serial killers. Kinda. Sorta. It’s like an Episode of Numb3rs where Charlie exposes some bizarre theory from the natural world and uses the maths to solve the latest darstadly crime. Yes, I am cynical. Perhaps I need cute FBI agent Don Epps to explain it to me?

Have you noticed an increase in misleading book covers lately? You’re not alone. I am as guilty as the next person when it comes to browsing the library: if I’m looking for an easy read, I go for the swirly writing; if I’m looking to have a serial killer terrorise me before I fall asleep, I go for the san serif in a bold primary colour. With dripping blood. I look across at my bookshelves and you know what? Most of my favourites I keep revisiting are my fathers old Penguins with their iconic design. Nothing prejudices my idea of what’s going to be in the book beyond the author, blurb, and how well written the first few pages are.

Yes. I see the arguments from both points because, frankly, most of the time I can’t be bothered to scour the shelves for a hidden gem, and AM guided by covers. I know though, that I am missing great books.

Frustration (also, uncomfortable I’d imagine!)

Vero has a tale of what a friend of hers found at the bottom of his pond. This appeals to me on so many levels, not least the archaeologist in me who is always telling stories about the past lives of buildings and landscapes. We think we own our land, but really we are just custodians for those that will come later.

And before I go off on a whole long rant, inspired no doubt by flicking through my old landscape archaeology notes in yesterdays clean-out, I shall bring you the promised lion cubs.

Lion cubs. So cute!

The new Large Hadron Collider at CERN isn’t for physics, really. It’s a giant art installation. Seriously, those images are awesome in all definitions of the word!

Kevin Kelly has some interesting additions to the ‘future of the book’ debate.

All I want for the future is for Neal Stephenson to keep writing books, but possible for them to be either shorter or lighter. I’m rereading The Baroque Cycle as I do yearly, and even the paperback versions of the books are house brick size, and weight.

I have decided, all the chick lit and YA/vampire/supernatural stuff I am reading isn’t chick lit at all. Really it is brain floss. Great term 😀

So I lied, I haven’t actually got Kevin Bacon in the roast this week (and on sober reflection I just couldn’t link to a Katie Price article, even though it WAS book related) but I do bring you news that Microsoft has proven only six degrees of separation link us all. What interests me more would be the strengths of those connections. Yes, theoretically I might be linked to a couple of big names in certain fields (ask me about the provenance of my PowerBook battery some time) but how reliable can those connections be? If I were to ask X to help me connect to Y so I could get to Z, would he/she?

Networks on paper are one thing, but what is making my brain go tingle is the idea of mapping connections and seeing what they could really lead to. I have just read Danny Wallace’s latest book, Friends Like These where he goes around reconnecting to people he hasn’t seen since childhood. The book is funny, touching, but what gets me still is how through people he connects to other people, and yet other people, and how they are all willing to help. Makes me think more about networks…

And lastly a trailer. Called Sex Drive. I wonder what it is about? I have little/no desire to actually see this film, but the trail did make me laugh, so it gets included
Sex Drive

Cas is taking a short break so it’s a Moose flavoured roast this week. Let me reassure everyone (parental units especially) that she is fine, She’s eating healthily – roasted vegetables for dinner, yuk! – she’s up and about not mopeing in her room. As I write she is busy sorting out her room. She just didn’t feel like roasting this week.

I shall start with a little news item from today’s Observer.

“Olympian, 80, warned over exercising on escalators – Former Olympic hurdler Peter Hildreth, aged 80, who represented Great Britain in the Games of 1952, 1956 and 1960, has been baned from running the wrong way up the escalators in a shop inb Farnham, Surrey. Hildreth said he wanted to prove his fitness.”

A recent study from the University of Portsmouth has apprently discovered that the wrong bra can ruin your breasts. Tell us something we don’t know. How many more studies like this are they going to do? What we really need is proper training for shop staff so they can help us find the right bras.

A report that finds there is no gender gap when it comes to maths is no surprise to me. But I am surprised that other people are surprised. Back when I was in high school (more than a decade ago now) there were equal numbers of girls and boys in top set maths, and almost as many girls as boys took A Level maths. I knew a lot of girls who took A Level sciences. One of my female friends has a PhD in biology. A few years ago I worked for someone whose daughter was just going to university to study engineering. No-one in the predominantly male office we worked in thought this was strange. The gender stereotypes have been slowing erroding for years. The only ones who apparently haven’t noticed are the ones studying gender stereotypes!

I love watching tennis, but as it’s rarely shown on British tv this means I gorge myself during Wimbledon. I’m particularly loving the BBC interactive service which means I don’t have to watch the plucky Brit losing (they are always plucky, and they always lose), and can watch more interesting matches with a hit of the old red button. This year Cas got dragged into my incessant viewing and became something of a Rafa fan (I think it was the rippling muscles that did it), which is why she was so gleeful this morning when she told me that he’d trounced Murray yesterday, again.

We may be coming up the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, but this is perhaps still too soon!

A Guardian blogger has been testing out the theory of a Canadian academic, who claims that if you want to know whether you’ll like a book try reading page 69. I’ve tried it on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and in the edition I have it was a particularly exciting page where someone was hiding behind a door with an axe, ready to kill anyone that came through. It has definitely made me more inclined to read it.

The model for next week’s Sunday Roast?

Not many trailers this week. Apple didn’t have anything worth linking to at all.

There’s this slightly blurry teaser for Yes Man. Very loosely based on a book by British comedian Danny Wallace. The book was hilarious, but I’m not sure about the film.

How to lose friends and alientate people. One scene in this had me howling with laughter, enough to bring a perplexed Cas in from the other room to find out what was happening.

Terminator Salavation teaser. Brad Fiedel’s theme still sends shivers up my spine.

So I have reached that point of loosing weight where your old clothes no longer fit, but you still aren’t fitting into the next size down in the shops either. I am having to resort to trousers and skirts held up with safety pins, belts and rolled-over waistbands. Which is lovely, don’t misunderstand me, but annoying at the same time. You see, I like to wear long skirts, and now they are hanging off my hips they are even longer, and the wheels of my desk chair seem to find my hems very tasty… I have lost count of the times I have almost inadvertently flashed my underwear to the office as I’ve got up from my desk.

I shall stop complaining though, because the omens are good for me to shortly have an excuse for a shopping spree. Woot. Which was a sarcastic woot, because trouser/clothes shopping is not a favoured past time. All that trying on, harsh lighting, mirrors, and twig-thin staff making me feel like a particularly curvy whale. Plus, no money and no room in my wardrobe!

Enough. I promise.

Whilst I am feeling much more myself now, looking at my bookmarks folder it seems I am still much harder to please than previously. I really cannot explain how 300+ feeds a day, totaling over 2000 different pages a week, equals 20 sites come Sunday, but it does. On the plus side, short roast means I might be able write it and then get to the supermarket before that big black cloud decides to rain all over Portswood…

I get bored easily and my life so far is a litany of discarded hobbies (witness the quilt that has been half finished for over 3 years now). Bored perhaps isn’t the right word, but I am at a loss to explain it better. See, the challenge for me is working out HOW to do something. Once I have cracked it, then I loose interest. Plus I have to be good at whatever I do or I don’t want to do it. Which might explain why writing is the one thing I have kept to, because there is always something new to learn and get better at… Still bookbinding looks like it could be a funky new craft to try.

Have you played the Flickr game yet? (Here’s mine, with my answers Claire, Millfield, Purple, Rafael Nadal, tea, Scottish Highlands, blackcurrant cheesecake, writer, friends, ditzy, Bright Meadow)

Interesting Gmail tip from Nils

Watch. Laugh. Watch again. I have one word for you – Wonderflonium! Dr. Horrible

If you haven’t seen Wall-E the movie yet, do. We saw it on Friday and it is awesome! I so want a little Wall-E all of my own, kinda like this little chap

Ignoring the shades of theses past, Leif has a very interesting and valid take on the ongoing debate over archaeological involvement with armed conflict.

Continuing with the archaeological theme for a moment, how computers have changed the world of archaeology

The CEO of Penguin on the inaccessibility of publishing as a career. You’re preaching to the choir here! I have genuinely lost track of the things I have applied for lately, and my failure even to get to interview stage is demoralising at best. I will succeed, but dag-nabbit, I can’t even get an interview for basic admin and modesty aside, I am an Admin Queen! Trust me, when I get into publishing my mission will be to open up recruitment. If nothing else, the industry is loosing out on oodles of untapped talent. Diversity is not just about the colour of your skin or gender-preference of choice. It is about different ideas and backgrounds coming together to make the whole greater than its parts!

(Rant over)

Perhaps like me you are not an X-Files freak, but are still mildly interested in the show, and want to watch the upcoming movie without floudering through sea of back-story? This handy guide should help some

And lastly, two trailer for your viewing pleasure.
Flash of Genius
Watchmen – I haven’t read the graphic novel (though I will shortly you can be sure), but even so this trail looks tasty!

And as the threatening black cloud has conveniently moved away down the hill toward St. Denys, I am now going to pop to Waitrose to see if I can resist the lure of their cookies whilst I stock up on groceries for the week. OOoh, but I lead an exciting life!