I AM READING NOTES FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, a cheery tome by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of
Crime and Punishment,
The Idiot,
The Devils,
The Brothers Karamazov (which my English teacher dubbed "the most boring book ever written") and
The Insulted and Injured ~ I'm sure the authors of modern
misery memoirs are peeved to find that particularly evocative title already used up!
I had some drinks this afternoon and sat under an electronic posterboard leafing through the cheery tale, which is set in a Siberian hard labour camp.
Dostoyevsky's characters ~ murderers, alcoholics, gamblers ~ remind me of some of the junkies I have met in my time ... I'm not saying anything else.
I googled various topics concerning Siberian labour camps and came up with a page from a
school punishment book, detailing how many lashes of the cane various miscreants received for such crimes as stabbing someone with a pear(!) and grave robbing~(!!!) Am I badly misreading things (you can click on the picture to enlarge)~? Or was the world even crazier in Victorian times (or whenever those whippings are from)..? ~ than it is now?? (Surely not!)
I thought I would invent some comedy crimes of my own ...
The only sample offences I could come up with were:
Allowing school hamster to grow too tubby.
Allowing goblin to chase school hamster ...I don't think I'd have done too well making up school rules in the dark ages, do you?
COMPETITION TIME ~ roll up and give your guesses, educated or otherwise, please! Tell me WHAT LANGUAGE ARE THESE SCRIBBLES WRITTEN IN?Answers in the commentary box, if yer please...
PS the end of my
HAMMY AND THE GOBLIN tale of wonder is coming soon. I bet y'all are yawning with excitement!
Brown bears are real-life Teddy Bears
YEP, winter is upon us. Creeping up, closing in. Darkness surrounds us. It's in the air. The aroma of bonfires, the stench of death.
Then little hammy goes into a deep sleep, breathing only a few times a minute, as his body temperature falls. Every 4-8 days he wakes up for long enough to bumble out of bed into his bathroom (hammies never wee in their bed, if you've ever kept one has a pet you'll remember they usually use the furthest corner opposite for wee-wees). Anyway he does a wee, then his tubby bum vanishes down dank and mysterious pitch black tunnels deep into the lower depths of his burrow. He returns football-faced, pouches packed to their furthest extreme with a face-full of goodies upon which he nibbles till sleep overtakes him yet again.
Anne Diamond, former presenter of breakfast TV, was standing in for Vanessa Feltz who's on her hols. I've phoned in and spoken to Anne Diamond before now and have to say she's very engaging. I can see why she's such an illustrious track record in presenting... 
Anyway here goes. A level results were out today. The conversation yesterday (on BBC London radio 94.9) was about young people going to university and the extortionate cost of this:
And it was indeed the idea of doing a German degree again that got me reading and blogging in that language. I remember my former counsellor, who'd done BA French, informing me it was quite normal for degree students to rely on English translations when doing European literature. Which I found truly pathetic. (I thought it was just me and my dreadful command of languages who was reduced to this, but apparently not at all...)
Eastenders is prime time soap here in the UK. It's probably unique in that it attracts (or used to in its heyday) a roughly 50:50 male-female demographic. 
Because she's saying "there is no formula".
77 WPM when I raced. But dropped my fag on the floor and had to pick it up before it set the house on fire. My ordinary typing speed is just over 60wpm. I didn't want to go full tilt because the reading would be false ~ I would never race like that in real life.
HOW FAST CAN YOU TYPE?
