So, you lot are odd. More specifically, I lament my complete and utter inability to map your responses, i.e. to predict which of my posts will garner millyuns of comments, and which will languish with no more adornment than a grammar nit-pick and an unrelated link. On the whole I'm in this blogging lark for the dialogue and wish to provoke same, tending to feel confused and unfulfilled if I don't succeed. This is provoking introspection. (Possibly exacerbated by an uneasy night after an emergency visit to my dad, who seems to have picked up a 'flu bug which is not interacting at all well with his motor neurone symptoms).

I am interested to notice that, while posts tagged, for example, "narcissism" on the whole attract a reasonable number of comments despite my expectation exactly to the contrary, posts in which I offer a detailed review of a film or book generally don't pick up on the comment action. In fact, most of them are not commented on at all. I am fascinated by this, and somewhat at a loss to account for it. Inevitably, pollage results.

Poll #1442936
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 7

If you feel unmoved to comment on detailed film-review posts, is it because (please check as many as apply):

Or, as always, leave some other pithy rejoinder in the comments. (See what I did there? self-conscious self-fulfilling recursive reference ftw!)

Hmmm. Wayward brain, c'est moi. The last set of subject lines on this blog have referenced, from the bottom, Belle & Sebastian lyrics, heraldry humour, a weak and inexcusable pun, Crowded House lyrics, A. A. Milne, netspeak, Yoda, The Firm's "Star Trekking", and a quote from the Spike sexual-dysfunction scene in Buffy Season 4. Either I'm ridiculously well rounded or I have the attention span of a stunned herring.

In the Department of Consciousness-Challenged Members of the Genus Clupea, this morning I woke up about half an hour before my alarm clock went off and decided to dash up to campus in the first flush of nasty traffic at about 7.15 instead of waiting until it dies down a bit after 8. Twenty minutes later, inching through Rondebosch, I realised it was Wednesday and I'd joyously locked up the house and set the alarm in blithe disregard of the fact that it's the gardener's day. Three seconds later I also realised that I hadn't switched off the alarm clock before I left. Gritting my teeth and turning the car around with a fine insouciance in the face of oncoming traffic, it was forcibly borne upon me that I had one of my contact lenses in back-to-front. I consider it to be a triumph of the will that I returned home with only a few restrained cuss words, and didn't immediately crawl straight back into bed. But my noble plan to finish the marking before the day started was, alas, doomed.

The vagaries of the week have been slightly complicated by the fact that my dad's in Groote Schuur this week, going through a batch of tests in the neurology ward, so the levels of Kafkaesque surreal have been increased materially by the need to negotiate the Giant Medical Bureaucracy That Ate Observatory. The people are surprisingly sweet, but I swear that building warps space-time. It has more floors than it should, and they're all twice as tall as they should be so that one flight of stairs is approximately endless. Also, directions don't work. A compass in that place would merely spin, in a desultory and hapless fashion, until rescued by kindly doctors.

However, consolation from the Department of Helpless Fangirling: China Miéville on crime novels. I've always stoutly maintained that crime novels are non-realist and offer the same narrative pleasures as fantasy, so it's nice to have my opinion (and large collection) confirmed by someone of Mr. Mieville's intellectual stature. This last being indexed by his ability to perpetrate, apparently straight-faced, not only the wonderful phrase I have snagged for today's subject line, but the following set of statements:

The various manly Virgils who appear ex nihilo to escort Marlowe through his oneiric purgatories are not characters, but eloquent opacities in man-shape: much more interesting. Dalgliesh’s irresistibility to hyperrealised moral panics du jour – the poor man manages to contract SARS – is an elegiac opera of Holland Park angst, rather than any quotidian gazette of a policeman’s unhappy lot.

Of course, he's China Miéville and therefore gets away with it, but any student who pulled that on me in an essay would acquire righteous quibbles in the margin in green pen, probably along the lines of "you're over-writing!", "somewhat prolix (look it up)", and "do you actually know what these words mean?" Also, probably, "aargh".

I'm being stalked by a bug. It's lurking in the corner of my vision, flexing its muscles and trying out special effects on my hapless form. I'm tired, crotchety (apologies to the nice young man who wanted advice during my lunch hour, he probably didn't deserve to be snarled at just because he can't read the notice on my door), glandular, sinusy and incredibly slow to think or move. Except all of it is only slightly, increasing only in tiny increments, so I can't really say I'm "sick". Either it'll get in all its practice on me and rollick off to the next victim, snickering, or I'm about due to be laid extremely low by something epic. News at 11¹.

For some reason feeling under the weather tends to make me default to watching mindless action flicks every evening, which is distressing because I've come to the end of my James Bond collection (all the Pierce Brosnan ones). On Sunday I wantonly introduced the Evil Landlord to the joys of Mr and Mrs Smith, more or less in revenge for Thursday's True Lies, which annoyed me more than somewhat owing to (a) the block of wood impersonating the lead character, and (b) the INCREDIBLE SEXISM! The scene in the hotel room with the wife forced to impersonate a prostitute for her husband's enjoyment may have done irreparable harm to my blood pressure. However, clumsy and unlikely Harrier jump-jet rescue scenes ftw. Mr and Mrs Smith, on the other hand, infallibly makes me giggle like a schoolgirl, it's so magnificently silly. And, may I add, rife with extended metaphor, so there.

OK, bugger this for a lark, I feel like hell. Going home early, and the Dear Little Students can possess their angst-ridden souls in patience until the morning, when hopefully some serious sleeping will have bored the lurking bug into packing up its symptom kit and buggering off.

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¹ Except I'm not allowed to say that because otherwise wolverine_nun waits up until 11 especially, and gets all disappointed.²

² I'd swear she said as much in a comment once, but I can't find it. Possibly I hallucinated it. At any rate, I can report that I use the phrase "In other news" ridiculously often, and "News at 11" marginally less so.

I enjoy Animal Review, they're bloody amusing as well as being moderately scientific. With the bat one they're also entertainingly rude about Batman, which seems to be my new theme. The article is giving me flashbacks to that weird, repetitive cut to a swooping bat which is used in the middle of the consummatory vampire-bites-supine-woman scene in Herzog's Nosferatu. I'm used to lecturing about film techniques for not showing moments of sexual climax - cut to heaving bedclothes, falling trees, thunderous storms, trains rushing through tunnels, synechdotal relaxing of hands... and diving bats? Yes, well.

Stv, whose tendency to acquire interesting domain names is more or less at the level of a nervous twitch, has set up The Salty Cracker Club for the purposes of documenting the end-of-month informal dinner club which takes the four of us off to a new and interesting Cape Town restaurant with each paycheck. Witterers are cordially invited to add their mite to the foodie discussion, if your proclivities should run in that direction. We're always looking for restaurant recommendations.

And, while we're on the subject of food: pie. Specifically, a book I remember reading when I was still at junior school, about a family of bakers who are asked to make an enormous pie for the King, in the midst of competition and scheming from rival pie-making families. The main character is the daughter of the family, and I have vivid memories of the scene in which her family smuggles in the giant pie dish by floating it down the river, with the daughter lying in it like a boat, dreamily watching the trees passing overhead. Of course, evil rivals intervene and the pie ends up sabotaged with too much pepper. I have absolute no recollection of how the story ends, but Google assures me¹ that the book in question is Helen Cresswell's The Pie Makers. Now I'm infecting myself with this nostalgic "gosh, must find a copy" thing.

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¹ Once, that is, my internet connection had consented to connect to more than one page in five, randomly, while giving me 504 gateway timeouts on the rest. What's with the internets? Honestly, technojinx!

Gawsh. I sent the edit commentary back to my Nice Proof-reader on Thursday, and am consequently drifting around at a bit of a loss. You mean there's no actual desperately important project which should be requiring all my attention right now this instant? Radical!

One of the upshots of this has been to make me recollect the existence of Purl-Handled Revolver, the blog wherein I indulge my bizarre knitting outbreaks in decent privacy. Fellow knitters may want to wander over there, I have a whole series of posts planned. She says seductively, and not at all in a self-pimping manner, oh no!

An upshot of rediscovering the knitblog has been the realisation that I never followed Robynn's link to the Mervyn Peake nonsense poetry, lo these many geological ages ago when I last actually posted. Why have I hitherto been blissfully oblivious to the existence of Mervyn Peake nonsense poetry? It seems a tragic oversight. Fortunately, Amazon UK has a plethora of 1p copies and librsa trundles back here in the next week or so, and he's traditionally something of a Peake-courier. *plot, scheme*

In other news: this bloody MSNBC.com "breaking news" phishing scam is setting the prevailing spam level ridiculously high. I must be killing fifty a day, which is a huge jump from the usual five. Let's hope to FSM somebody zorches it soon, bored now.

Too weird. The comments numbers on this blog seem to rise and fall in graceful sine waves which seem absolutely uncorrelated (in my opinion, at any rate) to the actual interest, artistry or amusement value of the posts to which they're attached. I think I should be looking for significant relationships by plotting comments stats against something like the phase of the moon, the gold price, my hormonal cycle, or possibly the wibbles in the space-time continuum caused by the flappings of Cory Doctorow's cloak.

V. tired again, all sinusey and headachy and post-nasal drippy. It's been a busy week, and this weekend is madly full of the soon-to-be-traditional End Of Month Salary Celebration Eating Out With the jo&stv (Jewel Tavern tonight), jo's birthday party tomorrow, and another play practice on Sunday. In all of this I have to finish updating this paper, illegally acquire and watch Enchanted, get cracking on the book updates, annotate a Masters student's Tolkien thesis, and, oh, yes, go through a 2cm thick wodge of board schedules, which I should have been doing today but haven't had time to, owing to a continual string of disorganised students. In other, unsurprising news, I clambered on the scale last night to discover another kilogramme has mysteriously vanished. I'm currently losing one approximately every two weeks.

Oh, yes, and The Bruise is now red, angry and even larger. Butt flab is apparently the sadistic artist's medium of choice.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was attending some kind of large-scale gathering in the woods at night - lots of cars, picnics, families, what have you. Afterwards I drove off through the night, preventing myself from falling asleep by the application of buckets of ice. A stop in a surreal and Cthulhoid small town for more ice resulted in unsuccessful visits to a series of poky corner stores staffed by strange, creepy people, after which I miraculously found buckets of ice standing in the main street. (I think my subconscious is actually revelling in the possession of money, here).

Eep! I shouldn't have raved so enthusiastically to jo about the motivating effect of the dinkly¹ little shaded boxes on a blog calendar, since now she's posting more frequently than I am. I have no idea why this engenders in me a vague sense of competitive wossname - possibly because I currently have nothing better to do. Also, weird dreams about jo last night - see below. I may feel a subliminal sense of ownership of her techno-jinx.

The Bowie-fixation has received a momentary check as I haven't acquired any new albums for a week or so, and am thus unable to indulge my impulse towards further contextualisation. Diamond Dogs should get here from Amazon this week, though. In the meantime I'm consoling myself with Duke Special, which makes me realise that quite possibly the Bowie-fixation is simply a manifestation of pervy piano-fancying.

V. tired today, not sure if this is the result of living it up with frog and mort last night (lots of excellent wine, made chocolate mousse, recipe here, mort; also forced the Evil Landlord to eat vegetarian food, heh) or random post-glandular wossnames again. It could also be the after-effects of being confronted this morning with the evidence that I hopelessly misadvised a student in a perfectly obvious way about six months ago. Depressing.

Last Night I Dreamed: I had to rescue the jo from the house next door (except it was just a garden, no house), and spirit her, several suitcases and all her children away in the dead of night before unspecified evil forces caught on. This entailed helping her pack the suitcases, which were all laid out on the bare earth and full of orange frilly costumes. I also had to evade and later attempt to run over the tall, thin, evil monkeys in the road outside, since they were the agents of the unspecified evil. I was driving a 4x4, somewhat inexpertly, and the monkeys were good at dodging. The loading-up process took forever, I'm not sure if we ever escaped.

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¹ This was actually a typo for "dinky", but on mature reflection I think I like the portmanteau implications - "dinky" and "twinkly".

In the Department of Vocabulary Badly Needed By Capetonians: wwftd informs us that south-west Englanders refer to the hordes of summer tourists as grockles, which is a lovely word. Grockle, grockle, grockle. Rolls off the tongue. In Cornwall they're emmets, which is the Cornish word for ants and thus also pleasantly apt.

Alternatively, of course, you could argue that this falls into the Department of Vocabulary Capetonians Should Be Denied By The Geneva Convention, on the grounds that we're all quite snooty enough already about emmets and grockles.

wolverine_nun accuses me of becoming very boring on my blog, what with the excessive amounts of Morrowind taking up my days. She is, of course, absolutely right, although in my defense there's a limit to the number of times one can blog about irritating cliff racers, and I should imagine you're all glad I don't. In expiation, here's the link I promised: the physics of an operatic soprano. (The voice, not the gravitational effects of the traditional body type. I said traditional, starmadeshadow, i.e. unlike yours).

In other, unlikely news, three weeks back at the gym is making me feel exuberantly healthy. I keep bending lissomely over to touch my toes in a sort of incredulous delight.

Am clearly in full-on retreat from (a) book updates, (b) bunny accessories, (c) my ginormous pile of marking, and (d) my state of health (still feel sick). And what better way to retreat than into TEH INTERNETS? Clearly this internet thingy is a cunning scheme from an interstellar civilisation to completely corrupt all human endeavour and progress by the simple ploy of selecting for literacy, curiosity and lateral thought, and then hopelessly distracting it, causing humanity's intellectual cream to FRITTER AWAY their time uselessly. At current rates, in about 10 years the BEMs will be able to stage a full-on assault on our planet, meeting no resistance whatsoever as everyone will be too busy blogging the experience to actually do anything about it. Baudrillard would be proud.

Ahem. Anyway. Linkery.

• The Lyttle Lytton Contest. Like the Bulwer Lyttons, except restricted in length, making for a delirious punchiness. Also, the perpetrator of the contest deconstructs them, presumably in the search for a platonic ideal of humour.
• Wondermark: An Illustrated Jocularity. Price sixpence, or by Post Sixpence Halfpenny. Severely lateral, and appeals desperately to the hopeless Victorian geek in me.

Things that are not working, apart from actual work: the sitting-room lights, my car alarm (keeps going off randomly), two bars on my heater, and the front gate, whose remote has apparently died.

In other news, today's postmodern internetty experience: wandering onto Facebook in a sort of academic what-are-the-cool-kids-doing finger-on-pulsy sort of way, to find out that, ahem, my dad's there.

Bunny Threat Level: bleah.

It's a sad, sad fact that I find myself uttering the pregnant phrase "I am so going to blog this!" a lot more frequently than I actually remember the interchange in question in the cold, hard light of day. I blame (a) my characteristic cheese-brain, and (b) the Demon Alcohol. Tonight's usual excesses of superlative Thai food, good wine and more or less hilarious bullshit, courtesy of the usual jo&stv, were accompanied by many gems of linguistic and cultural wit, none of which I can remember. Sorry.

Bunny Threat level is at least holding, on account of how I spent yesterday, in between teaching, marking, curriculum advice and staggering around drunkenly because I was too tired to walk straight, updating the Carter chapter according to the Nicest Ex-Supervisor's editorial comments. I am pained to note that I am capable of using some version of the word "particular" four times in the space of a single paragraph, and that the perennial favourites "evoke" and "resonate" turn up, on average, once per page each. Other than that, it actually makes sense. All is not lost.

Bunny Threat Level: Holding in the amber. As of tomorrow, pop culture is toast.