Cotton grass on Shutlingsloe. Deer in Macclesfield Forest. Lovely Bank Holiday weather.

Pop

A long time ago, I had the idea for using pop tunes for ceilidh dances. This file on my PC was dated 2004. Don't judge me for my music.

Jigs

• Sweet Dreams My L.A. Ex (Rachel Stevens)
• Practically anything by Mark Bolan
• Panic (The Smiths)

Hornpipes

• Lost Weekend (Lloyd Cole)
• Sheila Take a Bow (The Smiths)
• Spirit in the Sky (Doctor and the Medics)

Rants

• The Safety Dance (Men Without Hats) ^[1]

Schottisches

• The Chauffeur / Blue Silver (Duran Duran)

Reels

• You Spin Me Round (Dead or Alive)
• Don't You Want Me Baby (Thomson Twins)
• Love Will Tear Us Apart (Joy Division)
• Lay All Your Love On Me (Abba)
• L'Amour (Erasure)
• Road to Nowhere (Talking Heads)

Polkas

• Half a Person (The Smiths)
• Torn (Ednaswap, covered by Natalie Imbruglia) ^[2]

Mazurka

• Asleep (The Smiths)

Some of those rhythms have to be squished or stretched a bit to fit the beat properly. Also I haven't considered tune lengths at all. So for English dances you'd have to pick the dance carefully, or alter the arrangement.

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[1] Credit where it's due: doing a rant to Safety Dance was Rhodri's idea. If memory serves, he claims to have taught himself to dance a rant step on the platform of Piccadilly station while listening to that song on his Walkman — a kind of primitive personal music player, kids.

[2] Torn is perhaps more of a 2-time bourrée I think?

Scenes from the Commute II

What's going up where the Beeb used to be?

"Circle Square". Student accommodation, apparently: Vita Student | Circle Square

Demolition of the Precinct Centre.

There is a corner of Fallowfield that is forever 2002.

Googacle verdict!

🚨 GOOGLE'S USE OF THE DECLARING CODE AND SSO OF APIS IS FAIR USE 🚨

— sarah jeong (@sarahjeong) May 26, 2016

Snuck

I remember Simon and I getting very excited some years back about the rise of non-standard strong verbs in English. Here's an old blog post with a recent update.

“Snuck” sneaked in — Stan Carey

It doesn't mention drag-drug! One of my favourites.

I wonder about the influence of German, Dutch, and Yiddish speakers in America, learning English, but being influenced by similar words in their native languages. So tragen-trug giving drag-drug? I don't know about sneak-snuck, but there is a Norwegian verb snike (to sneak) whose past tense is sneik or snek. Wasn't there a lot of Scandinavian influence in the upper Midwest?

On the other hand, Wiktionary says sneak possibly comes from the Old English snīcan (with a long ī), a class I strong verb: snīcan / snāc / snicon / snicen.

Flyer on my bike for World Naked Bike Ride. What do you reckon, should I do it? Ha ha.

Seriously though, fair play to anyone who's brave enough to do it. You can see the flyer has basically disintegrated in the rain.

Following Sarah Jeong's coverage of this on Twitter.

In Oracle v. Google, a Nerd Subculture Is on Trial

Although I don't like the way this article divides the world into nerds and normals.

It's noticeable how news breaks much more quickly over on Twitter, including this case.

XML London 2016

I'm presenting a paper at XML London on June 4th / 5th: "Dynamic Translation of Modular XML Documentation Using Linked Data"

This is my second (and probably last) conference paper on the tools and techniques I developed at Stanley. It'll be almost exactly a year since I left!

XML London 2016

The bike next to mine was gone.

It was a rather nice Bianci Semplice, if I remember right :-( Should be on cctv.