No Middle Name

[inspired by the first line of the first song I listened to when I got to work this morning - who knows? this might be the start of a meme. Get on board now, before it gets popular and you have to start sneering.] "Come on, take my hand. I want to contact the living." I took Randall's offered hand across the table, and placed my other hand on the tv screen. It was hard to tell which was colder, deader. Randall had closed his eyes and was muttering under his breath. I'd never managed to work out what he said during these little anti-seances, but it seemed to help him. He'd drummed into me the importance of doing something, anything, of having a purpose. Not that we had ever managed to contact the living. We saw them hidden in the static on the tv sometimes, or in the reflections in windows. I could hear them in the other rooms of the house, but they would always be gone when I'd burst in, my "a-ha! caught you!" echoing off the walls. Randall said we h...

another test Originally uploaded by No Middle Name . I'll add some more words to break the line. One more test of this posting to flickr thing. I wonder if this will work.

Test post Originally uploaded by No Middle Name . I'm trying to get this thing to post automatically to my blog, via href="http://www.flickr.com">flickr . I wonder what will happen.

I'm just messing about with Technorati . I don't really know why. Move along, nothing to see here.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | First gay marriage held in Spain : hooray for Spain! I've just checked and my own marriage doesn't appear to be any weaker or mean less to me. Phew!

I wasn't going to blog anything about the London bombings. There's plenty of other sites out there, with a huge range of takes on the subject. There's no need to add mine, especially seeing as it's only me that's going to read it. However, this news story caught my eye. Can you imagine how you'd feel if your first novel was about to come out, a film company had taken an option on it, and a big ad campaign was just about to launch it into the big time? Pretty fucking good, eh? And then the idea of your novel happens in reality. Then it's not such a good idea after all. You just know that one of the first thoughts of the author, while watching these horrible events unfold on TV, was "Bollocks. That's my novel flushed down the toilet." And then, the thought straight after that would be "Oh fuck, people are dying and I'm worried about my fucking book, I'm such a shit". When everything seems to be going well, that's wh...

Language Is A Virus - some interesting writing toys here. [via Metafilter ]

Kung Fu Monkey: 4th Generation Media John Rogers has an interesting post about guerrilla TV, and how Big Media can make some money if they just give up trying to keep things the same as they've always been.

You know that episode of the Flintstones where the doctor tells Fred that if he falls asleep he'll die? Yes, you do. Ok, just pretend you do for now. Anyway, Fred props his red eyes open with matchsticks, his increasingly heavy eyelids eventually snapping them. Well, that's how I feel at the moment. My daughter has been ill for this last week. The poor little thing has a chest infection, which means she's been coughing a lot. Especially during the night. She's also passed it on to my wife, who has also spent much of the week coughing in the small hours. I've been getting a maximum of about 3 hours continuous sleep a night. Yawn. I haven't been this tired and grumpy since the little 'un was born, and we were getting up every couple of hours to feed her. In the meantime, Blogger has added a thing to upload photos. Which is nice, and if they'd had it a few months ago I'd never have signed up to flickr . I'm glad I did though, I'm really getting ...