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You Are a Pegasus

You are a perfectionist, with an eye for beauty. You know how to live a good life - and you rarely deviate from your good taste. While you aren't outgoing, you have excellent social skills. People both admire you - and feel very comfortable around you.

What Mythological Creature Are You?

Fun stats from Amazon

I always did like numbers, so here are a few: the 'concordance' feature from Amazon, for my new novel "Bridge of Dreams".

The hundred most-used words are interesting. If size is an indication of frequency, as I assume, then the boy's name is used more than the girl's, which could well be true (she gets called 'my lady' quite a lot, being a posh girl; he's just Issel). And 'boy' features but 'girl' does not, which is curious; and I'm glad to see that 'water' is in there, because it is a very wet book, but what on earth is this 'ing'? A consequence of end-of-line hyphenation, perhaps? Ick, whatever.

Apparently I have short words but long sentences, overall. Not surprised about the sentences. I hadn't known my vocabulary was so basic.

How sad am I?

Oh, good grief. Here's a measurement of obsession, if you like. I was just draining some rice, and I made a mess of it, and boiling water went everywhere; and my first reaction - honestly truly, in that minisecond between spillage and the water scalding my bare feet - was not even to think "move feet out of way", let alone to do it. It was to look around anxiously to make sure Barry didn't get splashed.

In my own defence - if the position is defensible, which I doubt - he had been fussing around my feet moments earlier, because he's showing off his best trick just now, which is Telling the Time Wrong. He thinks it's six o'clock, because that's tea-time and he's hungry. He's wrong. He's been wrong for about the last hour and a half, and he's still wrong.

In other news, some shithead spammer has ganked my e-dress, so I've been getting endless lists of "sorry, couldn't deliver this message" from mailer daemons, for a message that of course I never sent. Curse them with many curses...

Great Proofing Errors through the Ages

Oh look, '70s TV geekery. Worse, English '70s TV geekery. But I've just watched a rerun of the first-ever episode of Up Pompeii, and I do just love this.

The episode is based around the Miss Vestal Virgin competition, AD 72 (okay, look, it's British '70s humour, okay? Never mind that, just watch the numbers). The characters say so, and it's written on the posters advertising the event. Then, at the event, there's this big banner at the back, which reads 'Miss Vestal Virgin, AD 79'. And no, it's not a particularly curly 2, it's definitely a 9. And at some point during filming, someone must have noticed. But rather than correct it, reshoot it, remake the props, they just ignored it - only the next time we visit the event, the end of the banner has been judiciously wrapped a couple of times around its pole, so that the 9 has completely disappeared. Oh, how good is that...?