Being Mr. Kenny

Instead of buying people gifts, why not hide something they really love and then reveal it to them a couple of weeks afterwards. That way they get to value stuff they already own all over again!

This idea came to me after it became clear that my iPod, Barry, has either gone on vacation or been kidnapped. I’m still clinging to the hope that one of my housemates has spirited it away.

I stayed up all night last night working on shefbase.com! I’ve gone a little mad!

Which Star Trek character are you?

I got James T. Kirk. There’s no “insert this HTML into your blog post” thingy so you’ll have to make do with me telling you just like that.

James T. Kirk!

Dammit! No way am I James T. Kirk. The fools!

As quizzes go, you’ll probably find yourself clicking, “Agree” more often than you think is wise, so you’ll probably find yourself exaggerating your answers towards the end in a vain attempt to even things up a bit.

My advice to you, then, would be to exaggerate your answers all the way through. Maybe even make them up. First person who can get Janeway or Seven of Nine earns my unending respect. And possibly a photo of some chocolate or something, I don’t know.

Just made a plugin for WordPress which corrects the way it handles curly quotes under certain situations.

I used to just make hacks to core files to do this, but they changed the core files in version 2.1 and it was easier and more transferable to make a plugin.

So now I’m releasing it to the general public!

Specifically, it stops WordPress making the last speech mark in ‘6’ and “6” into prime and double prime symbols. It also stops WordPress putting a closing speech mark right after the parenthesis in (“hello”) which severely used to irritate me.

It also stops WordPress making the first speech mark in ‘single’ into a closing one. This is good for words like “doesn’t” or “can’t” but not at the beginning of a word! Quite surprised the WordPress Dev Team have let that slip past, actually.

Anyway, go and download it if you’ve noticed WordPress doing all these things:

Texturise Mod v1.0

Seriously, I think this is the best dream I’ve ever had, ever. The 100% best dream ever. Here goes.

I was walking by when I noticed my Dad’s car. I saw that he’d left the windows wide open, the engine on, and pretty much all three copies of the keys inside the car.

It gets better.

I thought I’d do something about that, since obviously I don’t want my Dad’s car to be nicked. I drove it away, it didn’t really matter where, and I came across someone’s garden. This garden was enormous, and one corner of it was an orchard filled with the best trees in the world. These were some really good trees. Instead of growing fruit, they grew fruit pies. The best fruit pies ever: these pies had the sweetest, moistest filling, and the pastry was short but not too dry.

I was heartily enjoying a pie from every tree when Judy Dench rolled up in her car. It might even have been her Dad’s car, too, come to think of it. She got out, nodded at me, said, “Alright?” and walked over to a tree and started feasting. For a while there it was just me and Judy, eating the fruit pies. It was a beautiful moment.

Then I found some crazy fruit that wasn’t fruit pies! It was like fruit was doing a satire on itself, but the satire was still delicious and wonderful. Like there were oranges that were oranges in every respect except that they contained raspberry juice instead of orange juice. And I swear I saw an emerald in delicious edible fruit form. Then I woke up for a bit but managed to fall back asleep and the last thing I remember was a truly phenomenal cloud of blackcurrants.

For some reason you could only walk through it if you were naked, which happily I was, and as I did the juice stained most of the United Kingdom.

I’ve only really described about a tenth of how unsurpassably glorious this dream was. I fervently wish that someday I will find this garden, and share it with Judy Dench. It would be the best.

I’ve written a new story, you should all immediately go and read it immediately.

Too many immediatelys? On the contrary, not enough! I will here insert 100 immediatelys:

immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately immediately

The story is called Know what I hate? and it features two of my favourite people in the whole world: the Queen and Tony Blair.

Read it »

Best graffiti ever.