This week we have a Moose flavoured roast for your delight. The reason? Cas felt like taking a break so last week she asked me to take over for a couple of weeks. She then tried to take it back, but I refused. The roast is mine, all mine! Mwah, ha, ha, ha! Anyhoo, I’ve been a busy little beaver all week collecting titbits for your amusement. You’ll notice a distinct difference – I don’t do tech stuff. Twitter is something little birdies do as far as I am concerned. You’ll also notice that most of my stories come from the BBC. I know I should try and get a more varied view on life, but meh.

In a couple of months time it will be one of my favourite events of the year – the Eurovision Song Contest. A time when we get to mock our European cousins for their taste in music and fashion, as they mock us for ours. Apparently, the Irish have chosen a puppet called Dustin the Turkey for their entry this year.

The Vatican is going to make it harder to become a saint. I’m curious, if the criteria changes what happens to all the current saints? Do they become saintlets?

British and American scientists have uncovered the fossil of a giant frog in Madagascar. They have named it the frog from hell, which I personally feel is a bit mean. How do they know it was a nasty frog? Just because it shares some similarities with the modern day horned toad, doesn’t mean it acted like one. It might have been a gentle giant. I think they may be jumping to conclusions based on it’s size, which is discrimination. I’d report this to the Commission for Froggy Rights (CFR), if we had one.

But while we don’t have a CFR, we do have a British Toilet Association. Is any other country in the world as obsessed with public toilets as we are? The government is currently proposing a scheme where businesses allow non-customers to use their toilets, to help with the shortfall of public facilities. There’s no real point to linking to this story, I just like that we have a British Toilet Association, and that the scheme in Westminster is called ‘SatLav’.

A little game to test your geography. This has had me enthralled for the past week. I can find most of the European ones, don’t do too badly on the Americas (except for the Caribbean), need a bit of work on Asia, but am completely useless when it comes to Africa.

Tate & Lyle, a major British company, is switching all it’s sugar production to Fairtrade over the next few years.

David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, has made a bit of a booboo. He referred to the UK government sponsoring students to go to Auschwitz on educational trips as a gimmick. Silly boy. Such a rookie mistake. Everyone knows that you can’t criticise something to do with the learning about the Holocaust without major (justified) backlash.

Argentinian teenager gives brith to triplets, again. She’s 16 years old and now has 7 children in total. Wow.

Especially for Abi, as many trailers as I could find.
Indy IV – I can’t believe Cas didn’t link to this last week!
CJ7 – like Flubber with hair.
The Happening – the lastest from M. Night whatisface. Looks good, as his trailers usually do. Warning for Firefox users, this kept crashing my browser. Could just be me, but I can only view it in IE.
Smart People – oh those crazy messed up academics, eh.
Redbelt – not something I would normally go for, but it does have Chiwetel Ejiofor who is a very good actor, and not bad eye candy either.
Street Kings – one word, Keanu.

And finally, a plea to the Great British public – please, please stop voting for Greg and Linda on Dancing on Ice! They are not up to the standard and shouldn’t be in the competition any more. Thank you.

I have noticed a distressing tendency of mine to start Roasts with “So…” I could make this into a motif, a signature of my blogging, but I won’t. I want to be able to keep you all guessing as to how I will start each week. This particular Sunday sees me sitting at the computer, bundled up in a scarf and wooly socks as I prepare the post for your delectation. I could put the heating on but the stubborn streak in my refuses to give in. Perhaps I’m just too enamored with imagining myself as a struggling writer in a freezing garret in bohemian London or something. Or I’m just too much of a cheap-skate to have the heating on during the day. Take your pick.

How has this week gone? Much of a much-ness really. Lots of going to the gym (damn it, but I genuinely enjoy going now); a very rock’n’roll evening spent in the pub with illyna and Moose drinking… cups of tea; a Saturday made special with pancakes and a late afternoon nap; and now a Sunday I expect will be spent primarily curled up watching TV.

Dear god I need to get me a life to write about! No wonder I’ve not felt the urge to write much lately, or that y’all are getting bored commenting!

I am toying with the idea of having a holiday at the end of February/start of March however. Somehow I still have two weeks of leave to take before the end of March and I could do with a break from the chaos that is the office – another couple of weeks like the last few will have me wreaking havoc with some form of deadly weapon. Or handing in my resignation a few months early! The thought of two whole weeks of lie-ins, pampering and time to write feels like a sheer decadence I greatly deserve. The only thing stopping me is that we have yet another office move looming large on the horizon and the thought of the horrors which I will come back to if I am not around to organise it… At least I have got the seating plan pretty much settled. I would have enjoyed the power if there wasn’t so much politics flying through the air. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right? I did get to tell the uber-boss-boss that this summer would see my departure. Oh, the look on his face still gives me the warm-fuzzies. And telling the RLO to be a man (using those exact words) was another highlight of the week. You’ve got to take your fun where you can find it I guess. On the upside, the new office is just across the road from the gym. I can see me getting very fit as I take the opportunity to dash out each lunch break and vent my frustrations on the machines!

And now I have vented far more than I meant to, let us get on with the reason I am sitting shivering fit to make my teeth chatter. A note about the NYT articles – NYT have started putting a lot more of their articles behind a registration firewall and I’ve not yet worked out the rhyme or reason to which articles are or aren’t. I’ve got a registration so I rarely notice, but apologies if any of the links cause you to stumble.

HarperCollins is going to release versions of books free on the web. Groovy. It sucks they’re not downloadable or anything else (I think this is a misstep personally), but it is a step in the right direction. I am one of those people who likes to taste my books before I buy them, and I am actually more likely to buy a print copy of a book once I have read an e-version than not.

Continuing a theme, Random House is testing selling books on a chapter-by-chapter basis. I know this works for music where a single track from an album can also stand alone, but a chapter of a book that is designed to be part of a coherent whole? Then again, cooking books, travel books, short story collections – those could work I guess.

Ever copy/pasted one of those little blog-quizes that spread like so much viral wildfire? Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea

I like Twitter – it gives me a quick and easy way to update about the little stuff. It has integrated rather well into my life, though I need to work on a better solution for responding to people who reply to me (as yet, I only receive updates online, so when people respond to a mobile tweet, I don’t know till I get back home). Sometimes though, it’s not the solution you think it might be

Licencing people to smoke? Interesting idea.

I remember the oral section of my GSCE German and French to be a bit of a sneak – so long as you could memorise your speech fairly well, you’d do ok. What it wasn’t, was stressful – and before you think I’m just a swot, foreign languages did not come easy to me. The whole exam process was stressful, rather than just the oral component. Which is why I think it’s ridiculous they’re talking of dropping the oral component of language GSCEs. How else are they going to see if you can speak the language? A wider argument definitely needs to be made on the validity of the exam process as a whole (how can one stress-inducing exam that is just a snapshot accurately assess my ability in any subject?) but just dropping one segment because it’s too hard?! Pah! Pah, I say!

Yes, I’m on an e-book kick in my thinking at the moment. Could you have guessed? I bring you the ever-sensible Jeremy on the relevance of paid-for digital products in the era of the ‘free’ internet. What really jived with me in the article he links to is the idea that authority and personalization are what increases value.

Turns out I’m a bit of a Twitter minority when it comes to my follower/following ratio. I’d like to follow more, but I just can’t keep up with everyone! (If you follow me but I don’t follow you back, please don’t be offended. And in keeping with the Twitter Stats thing, here are mine (I love that the most tweets seem to come from the end of the work-day when I’m waiting at the bus stop!)

Sometimes it’s just nice to know you’re not the only one

We are all living in the world that Google Search built to a greater or lesser degree. I’m not naive enough to think that people couldn’t find out far more information than I wanted them too if they cared to look beyond the first page of a google search, but to see my house? As Fred rightly says, it is the scale of the streetmap programme which has the potential to get really creepy.

As close as I get to archaeology these days. If you are ever in/around York, I can highly recommend the DIG centre for any budding Indiana Jones’ in your family. The centre is really well thought out and executed. I had the privilege to visit after closing with a group of similarly hard-to-impress professional archaeologists and we all loved it. If only more museums had been like this when I was a child!

Playing with author tag clouds sounds like great fun. Might be time to get me a CueCat and scan my library (my old spreadsheet is woefully out of date – and yes, I did once upon a time track all my books on a spreadsheet. I am a geek. Live with it)

Priceless. A trail quite ruined by gravelly voice-over-man, but this still looks really funny.

I’m going to end this week with a call – my RSS feed list has remained remarkably stagnant for the past six months or so and I think it is time that I mixed it up a little and read some new stuff, so I need you to suggest sites and things you find interesting. What forms part of your weekly travels through the internet? What floats your boat? Which writers rock your world? Who is the one blogger who knocks your socks off? Big, little, screwball or straight, I don’t care. I’ll give everyone a chance, so hook me up with some link-love people 🙂

(Just a warning: if you drop links in the comments, you will get snagged in moderation I’m afraid, but I’ll rescue you real quick, I promise. I’d like to do away with moderation totally, but I got greeted with 50 spam comments that slipped past various spam filters, godlike Akismet included, into the moderation net last night alone, so it is necessary unfortunately. One of the downsides of popularity!)

Credit for todays Roast title goes to the godhead, who deserves eternal props for recent road-trips. I can’t remember the exact sequence of events that led to such a quote-worthy line, but it did have something to do with five archaeologists being stuck in a car for a total of 11 hours, listening to a surreal mix of death metal, 80’s classics, Destinies Child, and singing loudly (and surprisingly tunefully) along to Ah Ha. One of those weekends that don’t sound funny when described but, to those that lived them, were priceless. I haven’t laughed so much in ages. It was a bit of a come down to go back to the office on Monday and the 9-5 grind. I enjoy my work but if nothing else, the conference reminded me that I really need to do something that stretches my brain a bit more.

Still I have a cunning plan in that direction, so all will be well 😉

Since I failed so dismally to bring you a roast last week, let’s see what I can do to make this week extra special, shall we?

And to start, one of those items I wish I could tag as “you couldn’t make this stuff up” – a Texas mayor resigns because she stole her neighbours dog

The British Library is digitising a raft of 19th Century literature to make it more accessible. Great. Lovely. And DRM’d from here to kingdom come thanks to the partnership with Microsoft, unless I miss my guess

Bill Thompson does a great job, as always, explaining the prevalence of surveillance in our digital world. I’m starting to get the knack of his articles as well; the first four/five paragraphs are the ‘news’, but it’s the later half where the stuff actually gets interesting and prompts a healthy reality check.

Something to persuade my mum that tattoos aren’t that bad? They could be used to deliver more effective vaccines. Thanks to the closing line that there may well be a role in the “routine vaccination of animals”, I have visions of Fido and Tiddles displaying some pretty ink…

The BBC has announced that their iPlayer will work on Macs in 2008. Finally! It has been bugging me to the point of yelling at the screen each time they show their bloody advert saying “iPlayer: making the un-missable, un-missable”. Grrr

The British sent 57bn text messages last year. That is a lot. For me, I blame Twitter. My bill last month was a whole £19.18! :O

As anyone who’s tried to get a digital map out of the Ordnance Survey will know, unless you’re in an academic setting (and to a less extent, even then), the licenses are fiendishly complex and expensive. Seems that finally the government is throwing its toys out of the pram over this. At last! I understand the OS is a company and has invested a lot of time, money and effort into these maps but do they have to be so damn trixy?!

British troops in Afghanistan are to blog their experiences. I find this interesting in how it ties into museum exhibits about the war. I’m less clear on the appropriateness of it.

Seeing as how pointless crass commercial hallmark holiday Valentine’s Day is nearly upon us once more, here is how geeks work. It’s not stalking, it’s an expression of devotion 😛

One of the many gems shared at ArchCamp 4 last week: Strange Maps. There’s a whole research topic right there on how people represent the world in which they live…

You don’t realise quite how busy the British waters are, till you see it displayed graphically (and in real time)

Two differing POVs on Google’s new Social Graph API. Both pertinent, both well argued, and both from people whose opinion I respect.

I have linked to these guys before, but when we got sharing links down the pub the other week, Neko reminded me about Temple ov thee Lemur, and in particular urban fox hunting. Tee hee hee…

I woke up this morning with a craving for pancakes. Not just any pancakes, but Scotch Pancakes. I always like the idea of pancakes, but the British kind just don’t work for me some reason when I cook them myself, and American style ones also don’t float my boat. Don’t me wrong, they are nice, just not… right. So I figured I would revisit my heritage and try my hand at Scotch Pancakes, which are more correctly griddle cakes… This is the recipe I used and damn, but they’re good! So stupidly easy and tasty. Mmmm, it might become a Sunday morning tradition, me thinks

Neil Gaiman is going to make one of his books available, online, for free (for a month). Which book? You choose. I’m torn between American Gods which was a book I adored but think might be just too big and weird for people new to Gaiman, Stardust (which is much better than the film, of course), and one of the other titles I am less familiar with and, consequently, think could benefit from some free-book-love.

This Flickr set is great – tattoos that people have relating to their (science) research. I’d be intrigued as to a similar pattern in Archaeologists. My experiences from Liverpool would indicate that at least the Egyptologists could be relied upon – getting tramp-stamped with an Eye of Horus or an Ankh was practically a rite of passage. Even my foot tattoo has thematic roots in the doodles I used to draw in direct response to the rock art of Megalithic Europe.

Have a dose of Google Horror

And to cleanse the palette, some movie trailers from the last couple of weeks:
Son of Rambow

Stop-Loss

Smart People

Dark Knight (in lego). Definitely one of those “some people have too much time on their hands” things, but genius none the less!

And now, as I’ve endured, and finally finished, Stargate: Atlantis (season one) I am going to go watch Stargate: SG1 (season 9). Yay for yummy Michael Shanks and Ben Browder!

So why a Roast on Monday instead of the, by now, Sunday? Because yesterday the CCM descended upon Southampton for a flying visit and whisked me off to Southsea for the day. We had a lovely time walking the Front, going round the Aquarium and eating food in the smallest cafe I’ve been in in a while (room for two tables). We had a slightly less lovely, but still instructional, time walking round the D-Day museum and looking at the Overlord Embroidery.

And then it was home in time for toasted teacakes. Yum, toasted teacakes.

Not exactly a Roasting day, really. Hence writing it this evening instead. I’ve been wandering round like a Grizzly with a migraine all day today, snapping at my poor hapless colleagues for no reason other than I’m unaccountably grumpy. Sorry everyone! As I’m still feeling grumpy, even after Chish & Fips and several episodes of Stargate: Atlantis, I expect my customary humour might be in short supply in this roast. Who knows – the only way to find out is to read on…

And the first item in the folder is a piece all about how wonderful 3G working is. GRRRR! I’ve been fighting for over a year to get our laptops with 3G capability… GRRR!!!!

Excuse me while I go and lie down in a darkened room for a moment, will you?

I don’t care what he said. He was a fricking hologram! How cool is that!

The CCM said something interesting as we were going round the D-Day museum yesterday. During WWII in the UK, our government had more control over us than Hilter had over the Germans – the difference was we succeeded our liberties voluntarily. I then ended up looking at an ID card in a display case. Not one of the proposed new ones, but the old fashioned paper kind you had to carry at all times during the war…

On the impact of technologies

Most of the time I’m not sure why I still subscribe to the NYT, but then an odd longer piece like this one on the possible future of US international relations crosses the reader and I remember. On occasion, they’ll publish a piece that makes you think.

Sadly, the EDLO’s birthday buns weren’t this funky. Maybe next time?

I was going through some old pictures on Flickr the other night, and was struck how things are still depressingly the same.

Should blogs be peer reviewed?

Let me introduce you to marvelous web comic, Geek and Poke

Scary, what happens when you hit publish

And a movie trailer to enjoy:
Penelope – I might have linked to this before, but I’m going through a mild James McEvoy thing at the moment, so forgive me