Enough events have accumulated in Real Life since the last time I wrote about them that it’s worth posting another summary.

The “Singing For Beginners” class at the WEA has started on Monday nights, and there’ve been two so far (six to go). One reason I have for doing courses at the WEA is to meet people and hopefully make friends, and indeed I have established private communications with one other member of the class.

The “Great World Thinkers and their Great Ideas” class starts on the 27th of May, and the other class I enrolled for, “Drawing and Painting in the Botanic Gardens“, isn’t starting at all because it’s been cancelled. I’ve been refunded for my enrollment payment.

As for my recent kitchen renovation, I have now made a decision about what tiles I would like, so the next step is to make an appointment with the tiler.

My final piece of significant news is that I recently bought my first mobile phone. My parents have been bugging me for ages that I should get one (isn’t that traditionally supposed to happen the other way around?), and I also thought it might come in handy for taxis.

I’ve been using it to send SMS messages mostly to my parents, and the phone also has video capacity but I’ve not used it. Getting the phone to connect to my computer via Bluetooth took several trips to the appropriate shops for assistance, but I got there in the end and I’ve chosen some wallpaper and ringtones. (Doesn’t work perfectly, though; an attempted upload fails about 50% of the time.) Below is the wallpaper I created for the phone, based on one of the fractals on my website:

I’ve created two ringtones out of music in my CD collection, both approximately 40 second excerpts at a quality of 96kbps. The first (which I’ve actually set as my ringtone) is from Planxty George Galiatsos by Jimmy Gregory, and the second (in case I change my mind) is from Ril A Do by Kila. The links in this paragraph lead to the mp3 ringtones I’ve generated from these tracks, so that people can hear what the excerpts sound like.

One thing that really sucks about the phone is that several songs (all of which are awful in my opinion) are installed by default and cannot be deleted. There are always things to complain about with new electronic devices, and I won’t bore you by trying to list them all, but I think that one’s worth mentioning.

In general, my home phone is still a better way to contact me. About that, please note that my contact details such as phone number and address are not jealously guarded secrets - I give them out quite readily to those who ask. Let’s imagine, for example, that it’s really late at night, you can’t sleep, and you want a conversation with someone. All your local friends are asleep and you don’t want to disturb them, but you realise that it’s a perfectly respectable time of day in Australia. Well, provided you know me, that’s fine, no problem at all. One thing I like about phone calls from people who are actually interested in socialisation is that they reduce the proportion of calls from people who are just trying to sell me something.

I thought I’d write an overview of the works of fiction adorning my bookshelf - not a comprehensive list but a fairly good summary, using enough examples to represent the overall spectrum.

To start with, there’s lots of Terry Pratchett, among my favourites “Small Gods“, “Hogfather“, “The Last Hero“, “Going Postal“, and “The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents“. I also have “Good Omens” (written with Neil Gaiman), “The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy” (edited by Mike Ashley and including Pratchett’s “Troll Bridge“), and a special honorable mention goes to “Once More With Footnotes” from NESFA Press.

There’s some Doctor Who and Red Dwarf stuff, some of which are novels (e.g. “Legacy” by Gary Russell, or “The Red Dwarf Omnibus” by Grant Naylor) and some of which are not (e.g. “The Monsters” by Adrian Rigelsford and Andrew Skilleter, or “The Space Corps Survival Manual” by Grant Naylor).

There’s some Tolkien (”The Hobbit“) and some C. S. Lewis (”Out of the Silent Planet” & “That Hideous Strength“). Also some Douglas Adams (”The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, up to and including “Mostly Harmless“).

Then there’s some miscellaneous science fiction and fantasy, including “Climbing Olympus” by Kevin J Anderson, “Pawn’s Dream” by Eric S Nylund, and some books by Irene Radford including “Guardian of the Balance” and “Guardian of the Trust“. I still have some anthologies of science fiction and fantasy for younger readers, including “Twisted Circuits” (edited by Mick Gowar) and “A Spadeful of Spacetime” (edited by Fred Saberhagen).

Finally there’s the very miscellaneous category, which includes “God: The Ultimate Autobiography” by Jeremy Pascall, “An Alien at St Wilfred’s” by Adrian Plass, and “The Complete Yes Prime Minister” by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay. I have an edition of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” which I’ve had for over twenty years and never actually read, but it has a cool front cover design.

Thus ends the overview. Below are photographs of the books listed in the last two paragraphs above - miscellaneous science fiction and fantasy, and very miscellaneous.

If you’d like more information on particular works, requests are welcome (requests are always welcome on this blog). I’ll write a post covering non-fiction sometime in the future.

One way to get ideas for things to blog about is to clean out old emails and newsgroup posts. I’ve recently cleaned out some stuff from about a year ago, including my contributions to a discussion on alt.fan.pratchett about Rocky Frisco’s music.

I’m not going to give a lot of background information, because my target audience for this post consists of people who already know it. But if you’re not familiar with alt.fan.pratchett, you should at least look at my sidebar on the right and make a note of the people whose blogs are listed under “afpers present and past” - all those people either post to the newsgroup, or have done so in the past. It will also help you to know that Rocky was a regular there for many years and has a somewhat legendary status. (I use the word “legend” in a strictly neutral sense: implying neither “hero” nor “villain” but more the kind of paradoxical enigma that’s so often seen in legends.)

One thing in Rocky’s favour is that he has a sense of humour, and you know he’s the sort of person to delight in being told that his music contains hidden Satanic messages. That’s what my contribution to the discussion on alt.fan.pratchett last year was all about, and now I’m going to share those messages with the world.

• An excerpt from Rocky’s song “The Long Long Night“, played forwards, says, “-n over yesterday’s newspa-“. Played backwards, it says, “get you, Lindsay, everything you want“.

• An excerpt from Rocky’s song “Sex“, played forwards, says, “See the sexy pic-“. Played backwards, it says, “hippies’ destinies“.

I found others, but these were my favourites and therefore the only two I recorded. The first is the longest coherent message I found, and the second is the one I judged to be most thematically appropriate (as hippies and Rocky have some things in common).

It’s possible that I’ll post similar “Satanic messages” in the work of other people in the future, but only (a) in the work of people who would appreciate the joke, and (b) if I stumble upon particularly good examples. No promises though; I don’t exactly do this as a hobby.

In Lynne Murphy’s blog Seperated by a Common Language, she routinely discusses dialectal differences between British and American English. I recently left comments on a number of her posts from 2006 and 2007, in most cases adding an Australian point of view.

I’d like to take up some of the points I raised in those comments about Australian vocabulary, but for the time being I’ll only list the ones pertaining to food and drink. I’ll save some of the others for a sequel.

• They’re usually red or green, sometimes yellow, and common pizza. The British and Americans call them peppers, but Australians call it capsicum.
• Apparently in Britain, monkey nuts are peanuts with the shells still on. In Australia, however, monkey nuts are pine nuts. (This is a new one for me: until I read Lynne’s blog post I thought monkey nuts were pine nuts everywhere.)
• In America it’s called cotton candy, in Britain it’s called candy floss, but in Australia we call it fairy floss.
• Australian children often eat fairy bread at parties. This is white bread (usually cut diagonally into halves or quarters) that has been buttered and had hundreds-and-thousands sprinked all over it (here’s a good photograph I found). In my experience when foreigners are introduced to fairy bread for the first time they often refuse to try it, as if they think it’s just too weird to be edible!
• When Americans put a scoop of ice cream in a glass and pour cola or some other soft drink over it, they call it a float. Australians call it a spider, which I suppose refers to the way that the foam creeps up the glass (besides, the ice cream is usually jammed in too tightly to float).
• It’s an off-license in Britain, a liquor store (amongst other things) in America, but in Australia it’s a bottle shop. Apparently it’s a bottle shop in South Africa, too.
• And now here’s one of the oldest and simplest jokes that still makes me laugh sometimes when I remember it: “Don’t drink drive. It’s a washing detergent“. Good advice.

I’ve now finished recounting the foods and drinks that I mentioned in comments to Lynne’s blog, but that’s no reason to stop so I’ll keep going.

In general, Australians refer to peanut butter just as other English speakers do all over the world. However, I was raised to call it peanut paste. Most likely, this was a local term in the time and place where my mother grew up (because I lived in Scotland between the ages of two and six, my only awareness of Australian vocabulary at that age came through my parents). Likewise, the combination of peanut butter and honey has always been known as paste and honey in my family.

There are various names for foods and drinks that denote different things in different parts of the world. Lynne has covered some of them on her blog, but not all of them by any means. For example she hasn’t mentioned lemonade yet.

And then there’s potato cake. I’d like to give this one a bit of space because came across a discussion of it today whilst cleaning out old emails etc. Apparently to Americans, “potato cake” is a savoury dish that contains slices of potato, and apparently there are also some Australians to whom potato cake is a different sort of savoury dish. But to me, and to other Australians I know personally, potato cake is a sweet dish which can be made with the following recipe (and being an Australian recipe, a “cup” is of course 250mL):

Ingredients for main part:

• 1 cup hot mashed potato
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 3 cups self raising flour
• 1 teaspoon mixed spice
• 1 cup sultanas
• Milk enough to make soft dough (1 cup plus)

Ingredients for topping:

• 1 cup plain flour
• 125 grams butter
• 1 cup sugar

Method:

Mix the main part to a soft dough and spread in tray lined with
grease-proof paper. Mix the topping to crumbs and cover dough.

Cook at 180C for 40-50 minutes.

I’d like to finish this post with a bit of an aside about franchises, particularly examples where different franchises in different parts of the world go under the same name.

A notable example is that Woolworths in Australia is a supermarket chain with the slogan “The Fresh Food People“, a slogan that would be completely unsuitable for Woolworths in Britain (the latter store was originally American, but it’s in Britain that it survives under that name). Apparently the Australian Woolworths was named after the original as a sort of mischievous joke, so any confusion this creates can be regarded as deliberate. That’s the Australian way. (In Victoria, Woolworths Australia is known as Safeway - and indeed it may be a “safe way” to refrain from mischievous jokes, but it’s a lot less fun.)

They tell me that in America, Wendy’s is a hamburger franchise. In Australia, it’s an ice cream franchise. I sometimes buy a banana malt thickshake from it (malt is an optional extra with all Wendy’s milkshakes and thickshakes).

I think I’ve covered enough ground for now. As I say, I plan on a sequel at some future date, using material from some of the other comments I left on Lynne’s blog to get me started.

I visited Melbourne for my cousin Laura’s 21st birthday party, which was celebrated on Saturday 3rd May.

My parents and I departed Friday morning by train. My sister couldn’t come with us because she is just starting another elective for her university medical course - this time on Aboriginal health for which she is spending a few weeks in Alice Springs. However, Rebecca did accompany us as far as the station.

The railway line from Adelaide to Melbourne passes through the Victorian town of Nhill where my cousin Robert’s family live, and when we got there his daughters Kate and Leah joined us on the train. Robert and Katrina could not come as they had other commitments. It was a happy journey, and I’ll give you one example of our activities aboard: making plasticine dinosaurs.

Laura lives with her parents, and Kate and Leah stayed at their place while my parents and I stayed in the Waverley International Hotel, which was within walking distance. It was a very active weekend, and we spent very little time at the hotel except to sleep. On Saturday we went into town to visit the public aquarium only to discover that it was closed for repairs, but we had a good time anyway - eating and playing and being together. The ice cream I chose for my lunch time dessert was half honeycomb flavour and half blackberry, and wholly tasty.

The party on Saturday evening was loud and crowded, mostly full of people that Laura knows through church. I did my best to socialise; many of the guests seemed surprisingly shy and inclined to stick close to people they knew well, but I managed substantial conversations with two or three people and brief discussions with several more. In the communal birthday card - the big one placed on a table throughout the party and signed by guests - I wrote the following limerick:

There was a young woman called Laura
Who had a magnificent aura.
Its purples and greens
Were a sight to be seen;
No person of taste could ignore her.

I deliberately didn’t buy Laura a birthday present in advance of the party, because I wanted to use the weekend as a time to gather ideas and learn more about her requirements and tastes, so that I could send the best possible present by post after I got back to Adelaide. I found the speeches at the party to be useful resource for ideas; I knew that Laura likes to see people having fun and has a taste for adventure, but I didn’t know about the spiders and had only an inkling of the bears.

Now that I am back in Adelaide I have wasted no time in ordering a birthday present for Laura, which will soon be on its way to her in a large parcel from America and should arrive within the next couple of weeks. I will not say what it is in public until after she receives it, but in the meantime if I am contacted privately by someone who knows Laura or me then I am willing to reveal all…

On Sunday morning my parents and I flew back to Adelaide, arrangements having been made for Kate and Leah that I didn’t inquire into. At the airport I bought myself a few things, including some new teatowels to match my newly renovated kitchen and a couple of CDs (Guardians of the Reef by David Hudson and The Distant Shore by Stewart Dudley). I got back home without drama.

For word processing I use Microsoft Word 2002, which was the most recent version of Word when this computer was new (before that I used Word 2.0). The fact that Word allows comprehensive customisation of menus and toolbars etc is an important reason why I’ve never switched to a cheap non-Microsoft alternative, yet I must say that the customisation of Word 2002 was the most painful experience of customisation I have ever had.

The problem is that due to some bug of mind-bending stupidity, half the time that you add something new to the menus, something else is randomly erased when you save the template. The solution is to make sure you always keep a backup copy of the template, and don’t save over the backup until you’ve checked that everything that ought to be in the menus and toolbars is still there. So long as you’re conscientious about backing up the template you can achieve wonders through customisation; it’s getting there that’s painful.

Another problem (though a lesser one) is bloat. Every time you save the template it gets bigger, even when you haven’t actually added new information. For example, if you modify the description of a macro and then save the template, the template file will contain the old description as well as the new one, and if you’ve modified the description several times it will contain all of them (you can prove this with a text search). Moreover, I think the template file even retains information about deleted macros and so forth!

I do hope that more recent versions of Word are more reliable in the customisation stakes. But I should stop ranting and get to the point. I’ve been meaning for some time to make some of my Word customisations public, partly because it pleases me to share my settings with others and partly because it could come in handy one day for backup purposes. So here is a PDF file that shows my customised toolbars and menus and lists their contents. Browse it at your leisure.

Note that the menu and toolbar contents are extensively customised, bearing little resemblance to the defaults; I did not merely add and remove features but re-organised them into a hierarchy that I find more logical (detailed comparisons are left as an exercise for the reader) and sometimes created new and better icons. It should also be noted that I did all this customising back in 2003, and there may be some features I used back then that I don’t generally use now, and also some features I decided to leave on the menus even though I have never used them at all but thought that some day I might (these are marked in blue in the PDF file).

For the time being, I am not publishing aspects of Word customisation other than menus, toolbar and macros. That would be too much work.

While browsing language-related blogs, I came across this, which links to this (Trabi Customiser) which the author of the aforementioned blog used to generate this. It looked fun, so I had a go and generated this (and yes, I’m aware of the deliberate irony behind the website, having been to Germany and all):

Incidentally, the reason why I was browsing miscellaneous language-related blogs in the first place is that, what with Language Log having recently moved and been redesigned, I thought it would be a good time to visit all of the blogs in Language Log’s sidebar. Having now looked through all those blogs I can announce that, in my opinion, the best and most consistently interesting one is the Cognition and Language Lab (which I’ve now added to my sidebar).

Now, while I’m here I might as well tell you some of my miscellaneous news.

I’ve signed up for three WEA courses: “Singing For Beginners“, “Great World Thinkers and their Great Ideas“, and “Drawing and Painting in the Botanic Gardens“. I did two WEA courses last year, “Wonders of Ancient Egypt” and “Magic For Beginners“, so this will bring my total to five. I think I’ve picked a healthy variety of topics.

In the near future (early May), I and my family will be travelling to Melbourne by train for my cousin’s 21st, and then flying back. The first of the aforementioned WEA courses starts the day after we get back.

I think I know what I want as regards tiling in my new kitchen, but I’m waiting on some sample tiles that have to be ordered in before I finalise my decision. Should take about a fortnight.

I cut my finger in a pruning accident today. Edit: and now a framed picture has just fallen off the wall and smashed. <sigh>

I was at my parents’ place for much of the last week while my kitchen was renovated. I now have a completely new set of drawers and cupboards, and a new sink. Also, the water heater was moved from inside to outside.

I was lucky with the benchtop colour. The colour I chose was a discontinued one, and there was only one sheet of it left in the factories anywhere in the country! I got the colour I wanted (the very last sheet of it) but I had to sign a form saying that I understood that if the sheet cracked during construction or something I would have to choose another colour and that I accepted the associated financial risk. I was determined to have the colour, because I had my heart set on dark green benchtops and none of the other available colours were remotely like it.

I am very happy with the colours of the new cupboards, including the dark green benchtops but also with other aspects of the colour scheme (for example I’m happy with my decision to have white handles instead of the default stainless steel). I do have some reservations about the dimensions of things - I would have liked the drawers to be less shallow and the top shelf of overhead cupboards to be easier to reach - but that’s OK.

The renovation isn’t over yet. Still to come, the tiling. But I wanted to get the cupboards in first so that I could more visualise what sort of tiles would be appropriate (still thinking about that). Also, the floor will be replaced at some stage, but that’s a job involving the whole house, not just the kitchen. I’m planning on cork tiles in every room except the bathroom.

Now for some pictures. That green benchtop is hard to capture on camera; it’s definitely green to the eye but transferred to my computer screen via my digital camera it tends to come out bluish. I cannot get my camera to reproduce it successfully, but the photograph below is my best attempt.

Here are two photographs showing the layout of the new cupboards.

And here is a black and white illustration with storage spaces labelled from A to U. Below it, I have listed the purpose that I have assigned to each storage space.

• A. Oven bags, unused rolls of paper towels, etc.
• B. Paper towels, plastic wrap, alfoil, kitchen bin liners, etc.
• C. Marinades, olive oil, etc.
• D. On the left: bread spreads. On the right: tomato sauce, salt, lemon juice, etc.
• E. Three-shelf spice rack (contains anything that fits).
• F. Rice, savoury biscuits, miscellaneous things in cans, etc.
• G. Soups, noodles and pasta.
• H. Unassigned.
• I. On the left: coffee, tea, etc. On the right: breakfast cereal.
• J. Desserts, biscuits, sugar, etc.
• K. Trays, etc.
• L. Casserole dishes, large glass jug, etc.
• M. Saucepans, frying pans, etc.
• N. Plates and bowls.
• O. On the left: sieves, funnels, measuring jugs, etc. On the right: cups.
• P. Plastic containers, etc.
• Q. Spare dishwashing liquid and other cleaning things. Also a few other things such as flyspray.
• R. Cutlery.
• S. Utensils such as cheesegrater, can opener, wooden spoons, etc.
• T. Teatowels, dry cloths, stovetop cleaner, etc.
• U. Recipe books.

I have mentioned my friend Pam Marlow on this blog before, and one thing Pam does is to write haiku accompanied by photographs (and she has plans to publish a book of them). Anyway, today I visited a small art exhibition in which three examples of Pam’s work were on display.

Here’s a photograph of one of them (as you can see, I used the flash). Please click on the image to magnify it and read the haiku.

A friend of mine (whose blog is listed among the links over on the right) emailed me this morning to say that she’s had a book published! I replied with my congratulations.

Here are links to her newly published fantasy novel on Amazon UK and on Amazon US.

[Update 17 May 2008: She's now provided a Myspace page including sample chapters: one, two.]