Blogs

Genova (2008) Michael Winterbourne starring Colin Firth. Two children. Two Adults. One car. You know somebody is going to die, especially as there was a bit of rough-housing going on in the back. The children were putting their hands over each other’s eyes. Inevitably, the younger of the two, did the same thing with mummy. Instead of telling her off and giving her youngest a good old fashioned thrashing (this is for picking your nose in the back...

Interview with Sir Donald Akenbourgh. Beatrice Foster (anthropologist), BF: Sir Donald what are your views can the human population keep growing in the same way. Donald Akenbourgh (DA): Yes. I’m optimistic that men and women will continue to have sex. BF: The Oogonyu tribe have a dream culture in which certain totemic animals come to them to teach them specific lessons. What kind of spirit animal do you think would come to you? DA: An apple. BF...

The Accused. Anyone that ever dogged school in the 1970s knows from Crown Court that two-scaled- justice is a fickly bitch. That’s two accused in Jimmy Mc Govern’s stable so far and 2-0 to the prosecution. There’s only four programmes to go so I’m hoping for a late run of not-guiltys so that we are left with a cliff-hanger finish. Monday nights was the better of the two shows so far. Two lads, best mates, join the same regiment and get posted to...

The old imperishables, distinguished looking books of a certain era, scratched and tried to jump into my hand and sit on my lap. They know well my habits. ‘Where have you been?’they cried in unison. ‘I’ve been trying on another life. But they didn’t believe I’d neglect them just because of that. ‘It didn’t fit’. They believed that. The dusty crones waited for me to talk more man-soiled rubbish; every page an invitation. ‘There’s always somebody...

Into the Wild (2007) is Sean Penn’s baby. He got the money together to make a film about Chris McCandless who gave everything away, even his Giro, and went to live in the great American wildness and find himself. At almost three hours long he must have got lost a few times, or my eyes kept opening and shutting. I gave up. Even my early training in watching Lassie and Skippy the Bush kangaroo wasn’t enough. I mounted the stairs a broken and tired...

George Mackay Brown. Celia I thought I’d ready George Mackay Brown because I could vaguely remember The House with Green Shutters. But that was George Douglas Brown. Ceila is probably what would be called a novella, which means it’s short, about 30 pages, but perfectly formed. It’s a slow burner. One of my favourite lines is ‘Faces tell lies to one another…The truth gets buried under smiles.’ There is a consistent strand of psychological...

08/10/09 Some notes on setting the time. Setting from the command line The date command: date MMDDhhmm.ss (Seconds are optional; omit .ss if just setting to nearest minute.) To set the year too: date MMDDhhmmYYYY.ss (Once again, seconds are optional.) To discover what time and date the server thinks it is, use the date command without arguments. Good to know, but it shouldn't be necessary to set the time from the command line. The ntp daemon The...

22/10/09 PHP Tags tags enclose PHP code when mixed with HTML. Abbreviated tag not good. Don't use ?> in PHP only file - not required and can cause problems with trailing whitespace. Comments As for C++. Comment conventions for Drupal: /** * Open comment as above. * Succeeding lines, asterisk with single space indent. * Final line: indented one space, as below. */ Variables First character always $, second always a letter or underscore,...

13/11/09 Copied ABCtalesradio files to ABC server. To test, put them in the directory previously occupied by booktribes.com. Tried to access via www.booktribes.com . Apache returns 403, access denied. tail /var/log/httpd/error_log shows: (13)Permission denied: access to /index.html denied The (13) indicates that the problem is with file permissions, not the Apache config. Checked that all directories and scripts 755, all files 644. setenforce 0...

The latest issue of ABCtales Magazine is now available to buy or download from: http://stores.lulu.com/abctales Featuring work by Richard McDonough, Simon Whitworth, John Nandy, Lynn Roulstone, Brian O’Hare Green, Marion Clare, Sanna Ryan, Jade Tolley, Jordan Nelson, Russell J Turner, Paul Morgan, Jacqueline King, Alison Wassell, Jo Garwood, Jane Seaford, Clare Mason, Leo Vine-Knight, Joseph Harvey, Phil Sawyer and Nexis Pas. Plus pieces read at...