Muninn and Huginn

Not. From the Grauniad: Authors in revolt against plans to vet them for school visits. Yup. Yet again adults branded guilty until proven innocent when it comes to contact with children.

Bravo to Philip Pullman, tho'. First taking a stand against labelling children's books for age. Now objecting to this stupidity too.

Just a short note in response to Bounty: the shape of paradise?.

I am a Bounty hunter. And it's Brill. There's always several left at the bottom of any otherwise depleted box of Celebrations. Now if only there were plain ones in there as well as milk.

Nuts! Oh, coco-nuts.... Oops! that's a whole other advert for a different manufacturer's product.

Went out to the hens this morning. All well. Miss D busy laying, R and T keen on potato peelings. Left all three in the run as I wasn't round to supervise all day and it was threatening to pour down.

Back after lunch. One very badly plucked and pecked Redly. A huge mess of missing feathers and blood on her back at the base of her tail. Miss D showing the same cannibalistic tendencies she had previously--and she prefers her victims red.

Took her out and stuck her in chooky choky on her own. Tinkle wasn't showing any interest in joining in with the bullying and I'd rather have the new pair look after one another and separate the sociopath.

Damn. So I need anti-pecking remedies and antiseptics suitable for hens.

Of course, since this is not the first time, the solution is probably to eat Miss Daisy and find a placid replacement. Except she's the best layer we've had, of course.

As I said, damn.

We have two new hens. Looby Loo has named the red one Redly and the Bluebelle, Tinkle.

They travelled up from Dorset remarkably calmly, took to the run, weren't too bothered by the white hen wandering round the garden beyond SHOUTING HER HEAD OFF.

Miss Daisy wasn't as happy. The situation wasn't helped by the thunderstorm and torrential rain. (I wasn't much pleased by it: the first shower landed on myhead and bare shoulders whilst I was cleaning out the Eglu and putting new bark chippings in the run. Checking up on the fowl has meant tramping up and down the garden several times since--with an umbrella.)

At 8.00 pm with the sky looking thunderous, I had to decide what to do with Miss Daisy who was hanging round near the run evidently wondering about bed. I took the risk of popping her in with the new ones and leaving them to it. Half an hour later, Miss Daisy was marching up and down one side of the run (think maddened caged tiger here) CROWING FIT TO BURST and the new hens were watching her quite calmly. I scattered a trail of corn into the Eglu and got Miss Daisy to shut up long enough to eat some from my hand. Tinkle forgot herself and followed suit. Redly ate some from the ground beside mt hand. Miss Daisy stomped off SCREAMING INSULTS AT THE HEAVENS.

I left them to it. There was further EFFING AND BLINDING. Then silence. As of 10.10 pm, unless they've been abducted by aliens, all three are tucked up in bed together.

Success.

Cory. But, I'd given up with Makers when I'd hardly begun. My interest in the work killed outright. A victim of the third paragraph:

The man of the hour was Landon Kettlewell—the kind of outlandish prep-school name that always seemed a little made up to her—the new CEO and front for the majority owners of Kodak/Duracell. The despicable Brit had already started calling them Kodacell. Buying the company was pure Kettlewell: shrewd, weird, and ethical in a twisted way.

Sentence one was fine--odd first name notwithstanding (I gather our friends across the ocean sometimes cast more widely for appropriate monikers) and "prep-school" (whose precise meaning I'm unsure of in a US context).

But sentence two got out a knife and jabbed me in the readerly eye.

"Brit"! Brit?

No, he's English or Welsh or a Scot. And no Brit inhabitant of Great Britain who's attended a prep(aratory) school (i.e. one of those private institutions that feeds into the public school system) would have a name like that. It does not reek of posh, of privilege, of Eton Mess and Wet Bobs and Dry Bobs (and all those other things that are completely foreign to me too). With a surname like Kettlewell, I'd've believed a good honest ordinary name like John or Andrew, and might assume he was a bright boy on a scholarship. Or something more unusual like Peregrine or Auberon would've worked with a slightly more elevated family name: Lacey? de something or other with a family tree right back to the Norman invasion?

But, Landon? Nope. No way. It's not in the Oxford Dictionary of First Names. Not even as a mainly US coinage.

Now, as a surname it's fine. But here in the UK, I don't think it's yet made the move from last to first that other names have made over the centuries.

Of course, the joy of electronic text is that I can fix it... if I so choose. A little search-and-replacer-y is all it takes. So maybe I can continue reading about [insert appropriate first name] [insert appropriate last name] after all.

And don't worry (and I'm sure you won't), you're in good company: I failed to buy Revelation: Space (I think it was that one by Mr Reynolds) for several years due to the misuse of "crescendo" on the first page. And there was a Brian Stableford I hesitated over because of the typo in the first paragraph.

Signed,

Perfectionist, Pedantic and Proud (and English)

Progress wasn't made in June: no books read (to their ends); no OU finished; no fish or hens buried.

Nowt.

Yesterday I (accidentally) caught a newly-fledged blackbird. Its proud father had taken the greedy thing out for lunch at the nearest restaurant, aka the chicken run. Daddy fled when I turned up to lock Miss Daisy in--leaving the little one in the run with the pecky hen between it the exit. Much flapping ensued until Junior left. Miss Daisy was so surprised by the explosion of baby feathers that she didn't actually run away: I picked her up from the entrance of the run and popped her back inside galliform gaol and she didn't object.