Verdunct Cromulence In The Mutified Serizone.

Daughter and I did drawings of submarines yesterday though she decided that hers should be disguised as a fish like the enemy subs in Stingray. My drawing comes from my childhood obsession with Jaques Cousteau's yellow, underwater saucer which I would draw and build out of Lego. Now of course I have enough software to build a proper virtual model which would be an interesting project I suppose. I did try and build a saucer out of the Lego we got recently but there do not seem to be enough structural elements in the set we now have. There are no long pieces to act as scaffolding for the skin so while I used to be able to pick up my old subs, this one just falls apart. And of course we used to have hinges and stuff which meant you could build hatches and other moving bits and pieces. I suppose I could try it in the virtual Lego. Watch this space for an import into Bryce.

Sadly, a colleague and I sat in the "encounter area" the other day working out Captain Jack's timeline. We had to leave a few gaps which daughter dutifully filled in from her Doctor Who-obsessed memory and this without watching Torchwood at all. However, compared to some fan sites out there we still have huge gaps and various jumps missed out. Probably bot a good idea to go then - sorry go there. Douglas Adams' concept of the changing grammar of time travel is spot on though we already have a grammar that handles location in space and time is just a dimension anyway. There are languages that have more or less tenses than English so maybe there are languages with more or less ways of defining location in space.

Language (and English especially) is very much like a badly-designed computer program where various requirements have been incorporated as the needs of the speakers change. Some of English (the spelling) is like redundant lines of code which do nothing while some of it creates a very inelegant way of handling a situation which could be done in a much neater way. Having said that, what we do speak, after a while becomes elegant simply because we repeat and become familiar with it. There are very few words which I find do not roll off the tongue - Oban is one of them - I just don't seem to be able to remember where the stress is supposed to go - but most speech just flows like joined up writing. Of course, any attempt to "re-write" the language is doomed. Language is always in flux and new words get made up fit the needs of changing times but so many people balk at the sudden introduction of these new words. I know there are ways of writing and speaking that really annoy me but they are usually of the form of phrases being used without any real understanding of what they actually mean, simply because they either sound good or make everyone think that the speaker/writer is clever. Still biggest culprit in this is probably yours truly.

Humble contrafibularities to all.