Good news

I'm about to squander 189,000 air miles on sending us to NYC, Upper Class ;-) Flying out Memorial Day (late May Bank Holiday) weekend, coming back 2 weeks later.

We figured we might as well do it when she's little enough to use a skycot--a child ticket takes the same number of miles as an adult!

Also, for "free" tickets, you only pay the fixed surcharges, not the (relatively small) portion of tax that's based on the value of the fare. So the only difference between flying Economy and flying UC is the £40 of extra APD (well, per person). So 3 of us can fly in style for £427. :-) (Greens, eat your heart out. Still, not going isn't an option since my dad can't fly and the only alternative to flying is the QM2, which is only an option if you have 2 weeks to spend travelling and lots of money to do it.)

We're watching 28 Days Later on Film4+1. The beginning is very Day of the Triffids, isn't it?

Thou shalt not rely on spell-check

When speaking of chocolate:

"... almost impossible to find something acceptable to the palette."

When speaking of gastronomy, one speaks of the palate.

The standard of copy-editing these days...

(from Saturday's Guardian.)

Oh dear lord.

Someone accused me of being racist over the KFC rip-off thing.

I had to point out that 1) I'm American and well aware of the fried chicken/black connection; 2) my high school was 20% black (I can hardly be accused of being one of those whiteys who thinks all black people are evil hoodie-wearers--heck the 2nd ranked guy in my HS class was black. He went to Harvard.); and 3) the KFC ripoff thing is economic, not ethnic. Go to a well off black area in the US and you will not see Mississippi Fried Chicken. There might be a real KFC, and a proper fried chicken restaurant, but the cheap takeaway phenomenon is very much an inner-city thing, of all ethnic stripes.

She also blithely asserted that it's "not a Turkish thing" (because I mentioned that my area is middle class, so we seem to have a surfeit of Turkish ocakbasi places instead). Explain to me the halal chicken-and-kebab places then...

The point isn't the fried chicken. The point is the number of dodgy takeaways, and specifically, KFC _rip-offs_--indicating that it's a ghetto avoided by the real chains.

I have a Long Island baby!

She likes Billy Joel ;-)
(I was playing "Only the Good Die Young" and she was grinning and bouncing her head.)

Clever baby

She's worked out how to turn from front to back. Now she's working on back to front. She was lying next to me on the bed earlier and I could see her trying. She got her side up a few inches, but can't roll over. I give it a couple of weeks, max. Then I won't be able to turn my back on her...

She likes Green Eggs and Ham and Bach's Goldberg Variations (though I can't listen to the Aria without thinking of Silence of the Lambs) but Iggy Pop got a thumbs-down.