I can’t understand why they’re having trouble getting kids to study science if this is what scientists get up to.

Saw Henry IV Part I at the National Theatre last night, really enjoyed it. The staging was excellent, Michael Gambon was a fantastic Falstaff, and the rest of the cast were very good. I’ll have to wait a month to see Part II, and will have been in Turkey inbetween so I’ll have to remind myself of who is who and doing what to whom.
Also turns out this Henry is the one with all the schoolboy insults, which was an added bonus.
It’s hot in London! Summer may actually have arrived. I’m off to Greenwich today for Sara’s hen’s day, then back in Covent Garden/Soho tonight with Ernest and Evil Jo.

I’m sure the word ‘mullet’ was widely used before 1994 but the BBC and the OED don’t think so.

So now I know I’ll be stuck in the desert for two weeks with no internet, newspapers, radio or television, I’ve got the excuse I’ve been waiting for to buy an mp3 player. Any suggestions? I love my iPod shuffle but if there’s something cheaper than an iPod that will work just as well on my mac, I’d be interested.

I’ve finally got my dates for Turkey. I’ll leave around July 5 and get back July 21. This means I can finally start planning everything else this summer. I’m excited to be going back on site, but it’s also going to be really long days and hard work in the heat.
I went to see Garbage tonight with Rosie. Shirley Manson is still a babe (as is Rosie, of course).
Tomorrow night twelve of us are getting dressed up and going to see Burlesque!.

Random googling (for virus plushies, if you must know), brought me to this: “This website features a series of drawings made by children who were abducted by aliens for the alien purpose of creating a new race of alien/human hybrids.”

Bill Bryson rocks.
“Author Bill Bryson is to send a free copy of his best-selling science book – A Short History of Nearly Everything – to every secondary school in Britain.”

The wonder of the internet… a site with photos and sound files from Australia, You’re Standing in it (via nostalgiacentral.com). As kids, we only understood it at the broadest level, so it’s interesting to look back on it. I’d forgotten about the Dodgy Brothers, and Chunky Custard. Amazing!
There’s an interesting commentary on the site: “…in Australia in 1983 one couldn’t sit in a bus, stand in a queue, or visit a student union without overhearing at least one Tim or one Debbie. Their manner had become the house style of young trendies and the survivors of the counter-culture: a mature target ready for plucking. So when Tim and Debbie landed on our television screens in 1983, their real counterparts seemed to vanish overnight, demonstrating that the fate of all truly effective satire is to render itself obsolete.
If Tim and Debbie’s original targets are extinct, there may be fresh ones in sight, for cable TV and the Internet are breeding their own kinds of Tims and Debbies in the form of terminal media junkies.”