http://www.thingsmovearound.com "I'm going to memorise your name, then throw away my head" - Oscar Levant Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:04:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The French for "diving" is "plongeon". Just say it over and over in your best French accent. It does sound a bit like being underwater, doesn't it? http://www.thingsmovearound.com/2008/08/10/learned-from-olympics-1/ Yesterday I came home to a dragonfly, which had entered via the balcony and become disoriented. It had based itself in a windowless corner - or rather openingless, since the whole apartment is window - and periodically sallied out, zanting about the room in a panic, my daughter saying "he ... http://www.thingsmovearound.com/2008/08/06/oding/ Tomorrow is Pride Parade - I'm going to take E out (it's L's naptime) and applaud dancers, eat gyoza, ogle buff homos, jeer politicians, and hurl excreta at phony corporates. Today I read Dahl's "Fantastic Mr Fox" to E, which she loved. Back to crappy Stuart Little tomorrow: "he's a mouse" ... http://www.thingsmovearound.com/2008/08/03/quotidian/ I woke up today with a dead arm, a dead neck and a dead ear. I was practically a corpse! http://www.thingsmovearound.com/2008/07/30/wake-up-dead/ Summer is here, and there is nothing I like better than to spend my free time people-watching. I sit quietly, all alone, sipping a soft drink, and remark silently on the great variety of interesting people I see. Here, for example, is what I saw today, between twelve and one ... http://www.thingsmovearound.com/2008/07/02/hoi-polloi/ While Lucretius was right about some things: Atoms are in constant motion (2.62) There are other worlds than Earth (2.1048) Centaurs never existed (5.878) Thunder comes after lightning because sound is slower than light (6.164) ...and wrong about others: Atoms move faster than light (2.142) Images are caused by films thrown off from the surface of things ... http://www.thingsmovearound.com/2008/06/27/digested/ It won't be the Olympics without the Bulagrian weightlifting team. Every four years I scour the schedules specifically to see them in action - especially the women - so this news makes me very sad. As is the Bulgarian Weightlifting Federation: "The work has become meaningless and the tears that were ... http://www.thingsmovearound.com/2008/06/27/no-beijing-thing-for-vulgar-bulgars/ I spent Saturday out of doors, labouring - not in the giving birth sense of the word, but in the horny-handed son of toil, labor omnia vincit sense. Although my labour wasn't especially hard, it was sufficient to inflict an assortment of aches on my thumbs, shoulders and my left ... http://www.thingsmovearound.com/2008/06/23/prybars-c/ http://www.thingsmovearound.com/2008/06/13/feet/ I've chosen my top 10 quotations of Leif Segerstam: Was this a conspiration to read my beat? Just play in your box until you come to the climax... so that we hear the clappering. The winds can rehearse the length of the teedle-eedle-boom. Something is satelliting out of the control of the beated music. How ... http://www.thingsmovearound.com/2008/06/05/we-still-have-a-pleep/