Monthly Archives: August 2007

Splinter

Yesterday morning, as I was making breakfast, I got a wood splinter in the tip of the middle finger of my left hand from one of my kitchen cabinets that, try as I might, I could not get out. I tried squeezing my finger and digging around with a pair of tweezers, but all to no avail.

Since I was late for work, I gave up eventually, thinking that the splinter would probably work it’s way to the surface in time anyway.

But it didn’t. It continued to cause me pain, and to make common daily activities such as typing painful. Finally tonight I turned to t’Internet in desperation, and of course found exactly what I was looking for: Instructions, including a video, on how to remove a splinter.

And it worked! The splinter is out, at last.

This is England

Last week I saw “This is England,” a great movie by Shaun Meadows about skinhead culture in Britain in the early eighties, and was struck by how much it reminded me of Letchworth, the town in Hertfordshire where I grew up (it was especially poignant because I saw the movie with Johnny D., who also grew up with me in Letchworth, so we were able to reminisce about our shared childhood memories of skinheads roaming the streets, with Stanley knives at the ready, after the movie).

It’s often difficult to imagine the violent youth subculture in small, leafy towns like Letchworth; but here’s a (somewhat sarcastic) quote about gun crime in Letchworth from today’s Channel 4 Snowmail:

Hertfordshire shootings
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And it ain’t only Liverpool/Manchester/London. Because today, the day after Rhys Jones was killed, several people were injured in a gunfight in that well-known urban gangland hell-hole….er… Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire.

This shooting has also now made the BBC national news: Six held after man shot in face

Land of Milk & Honey?

Today I awoke to discover that I had only enough milk for coffee, but not enough for a bowl of cereal (Kashi Autumn Wheat is my cereal of choice at the moment) for breakfast.

“No problem,” I thought to myself, “I’ve got bread, I’ll have toast with butter and honey.”

I then proceeded to drop both slices of toast on the floor — and of course both slices landed butter-and-honey side down.