The word ‘podcast’ has entered the Oxford English Dictionary. Ben Hammersley, who first coined it, is understandably chuffed.

Wonderful post by Andrew Brown…

Marlborough College is trying to expel a boy merely for being thick and unpleasant. Perhaps you had to have been there to understand how absurd this is. It’s like being thrown out of Big Brother for being a shallow exhibitionist.

This is a school which has been hated by any pupil of any intelligence or sensibility for as long as it has existed. When I was there, the punishment for new boys thought clever was a kind of gang rape involving boot polish and sometimes sodomy with a broomstick. At the time, I would have welcomed, perhaps incredulously, any sign that the authorities thought anyone could be too stupid or too nasty for the school. Now I know better. If the school has shareholders, they should sue it at once for diluting its brand equity. Up until now, to be an Old Marlburian has made a very clear statement about a man — that he is at best a rather pious evangelical Christian, but very probably nastier, more fucked up or more stupid than even the average Anglican bishop. Should this change, no one will know what being an old Marlburian means, and the £22,000 a year that parents pay to brand their children will be entirely wasted.

I’m relieved to read this. I’ve always thought that parents who send their kids to public schools (i.e. ‘private’ schools in UK parlance) must hate them. Nice to have it confirmed.

Update: In a thoughtful comment on Andrew’s post, David Smith complains that I have “repeated the tired rubbish about children at boarding schools being hated by their parents”. Hmmm… I’m sure there are some occupational circumstances which might mean that a child is better being sent away to school, but those aside I’ve never seen the point of having children and then being separated from them in their formative years. And I’ve seen quite a few public schoolboys in my time who were clearly disliked — and in one or two cases even loathed — by their parents. Sending them away was just a socially-acceptable way of dodging parental responsibility. Or perhaps it was a way of making sure that they didn’t strangle their offspring.

Kerouac redux. Two guys quit their corporate jobs and decided they want to see America. So they decided to make a road journey from Seattle to Boston — on a Segway. And make a film about it. See the trailer and wonder.

Well, well. BBC Online reports that

A nun is protesting outside Lincoln Cathedral over the filming of the movie of controversial bestselling book the Da Vinci Code.

Plans for a .xxx top-level domain (effectively a virtually red-light district) were supposed to be finalised by ICANN this week. But according to Good Morning Silicon Valley, they’ve hit a snag.

In a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Michael Gallagher, assistant secretary at the Commerce Department, asked that approval of the planned domain be postponed pending further study. “The Department of Commerce has received nearly 6,000 letters and e-mails from individuals expressing concern about the impact of pornography on families and children,” Gallagher wrote. “The volume of correspondence opposed to creation of a .xxx (domain) is unprecedented. Given the extent of the negative reaction, I request that the board (provide) adequate additional time for these concerns to be voiced and addressed before any additional action takes place.” The Department of Commerce isn’t the only agency suggesting ICANN put the brakes on .xxx. ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee recommended a similar course recently as well, noting a “strong sense of discomfort” over the domain in a number of its member countries. All of this leaves ICANN in a difficult position and one for which the agency has no one to blame but itself.

Apropos my earlier observations about the film, how about this from the Lincolnshire Echo?

A Corner of Lincoln was today being transformed into a Hollywood film set as the stars of The Da Vinci Code arrived.

Film-makers have moved into Lincoln Cathedral to begin filming the highly anticipated blockbuster based on Dan Brown’s best-selling novel.

This morning big name stars Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou and Ian McKellen were ushered into the cathedral under the tightest security to start filming.

Excitement in Lincoln is running high.

Butcher Kenny Roberts, owner of Elite Meats in Bailgate, said having the film crew visit Lincoln was a real plus for him.

“I’m doing the catering for 400 of the crew each day,” he said.

“Somebody called me last week to place an order.

“I’ll be supplying 400 individual pork pies, 300 Lincolnshire sausages and 500 rashers of bacon for the bacon sarnies. It’s a real coup for me.”

For weeks, it seems, an area of the cathedral has been slowly transformed into a section of Westminster Abbey. The scenes to be shot in the cathedral come towards the end of the film, when characters played by Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou finally discover the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton.

Thanks to Dave Hill for the link, though what he’s doing reading the Lincolnshire Echo I cannot imagine! And can it really be the case that it takes 400 people to shoot a few scenes? No wonder Hollywood’s in trouble.

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

Thus wrote Dan McKay, a 43-year-old quantitative analyst for Microsoft Great Plains, en route to winning the 23rd Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

The competition — an international literary parody contest — commemorates the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). Entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for The Last Days of Pompeii, Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words later adopted by Snoopy in the Peanuts comic strip: “It was a dark and stormy night…”

Well, it must make a nice change from writing guff about Windows ‘solutions’.

After a terrifying year during which I feared I had pruned our vine too severely, we look like having a bumper harvest this time around. All that’s needed now is some sunshine and warmth to ripen the crop.