Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

This is a real labour of love: a replica stargate!

But what struck me most about the video was the soundtrack; the opening is clearly a mashup of Holst's Mars and Sibelius' Finlandia...

Not much to be positive about in the euro elections, what with Ukip doing well in the UK and the Front National pulling the same trick in France. At least the BNP were wiped out, but even that isn't as good as it might be: the Guardian quotes their leader as saying, when asked whether people had rejected his party's racist policies, "They've voted for Ukip's racist policies instead." Dismal.

A mild piece of whimsy: a minor query from an external academic with almost exactly the same name as me. Not hugely surprising but I still went slightly out of my way to deal with it, partly to do my namesake a good turn and partly out of the sheer WTF-ery of it.

Unfotunately, I've had my bag stolen. I don't so much resent the theft itself — although, obviously, I do — so much as the inconvenient circumstances: it was stolen from my locker while I was swimming. As a result, I was left standing around in the reception of the sports centre in my trunks with nothing to my name but a hat, a pair of goggles and my shoes which, thankfully, were not in my bag.

Fortunately, the people at the sports centre were extremely helpful. They contacted the police, gave me an old promotional t-shirt — score! — and a pair of shorts from lost property. When I got home, I threw myself on the mercy of one of my neighbours and used their phone to call the landlord. After my landlord had rushed over with their spare keys — something for which I was pathetically greatful — I then got to spend the rest of the evening on the phone to the bank, to work, and to the police cancelling things and given statements. All most inconvenient.

So although I'm aggrieved, I'm also able to see the funny side. Because there is something absurd about being left standing around semi-naked with nothing to change into but a pair of shoes and someone else's leavings, while some criminal loser frantically tries to fence a 6 year-old phone and a pair of scruffy short-legged jeans...

It's hard not to be appalled at the way seanan_mcguire has been screwed over by forces beyond her control. Her latest book was scheduled to be released on the 6th but Amazon, for some reason, have started shipping paper copies a couple of weeks early, effectively splitting the first week sales and harming the book's sales stats.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, the decision to hold the ebook back until the official release date has led to a load of particularly arseholish types to dump a big steaming pile of unpleasant, entitled, solipsistic invective on McGuire, on the grounds that she has personally intervened in order to gouge them for the full cost of a dead tree copy instead of allowing them to spend a few pennies less on an e-edition. It's difficult to believe that people with such unpleasant attitudes exist and, more so, think it right and proper to be quite so rude to someone they must, on some level (because they were going to buy the book, right?) approve of. God.

Sharp and unpleasant transition listening to this morning's Today Programme. After a feelgood feature about a jazz orchestra in Lahore — they featured an charming version of Take Five — they shifted to Norway and the shootings in Oslo.

Having only heard the bare bones of the news about the explotion yesterday when the news began to break, I woke up to discover that not only had there been a bombing but that 90 people had also been shot dead. WTF? It's almost unimaginable.