little bits of everything

I don't often check my Flickr photo stats, but I happened to the other week and found a massive spike in the number of views. Normally I get around 100-200 views a day, but on that particular day I got 569,829. My theory is that they came from this post on Viralnova about money trees . I reckon that somehow embedding the pictures on that web page caused the view count to go up. It's interesting that as well as the two money tree pictures the ones near it in the photo stream also got a lot of views. I couldn't find anyone else reporting that they've had a similar big jump, so I put this post out there in case someone knows just why the pageviews did go up.

I didn't realise until I came across this book that Douglas Adams had written Doctor Who episodes. So what was the intersection of these two major parts of British SF like? Douglas had already written an episode called City of Death  (note requires Real Player - actually it doesn't require it, but I just wanted to say such an anachronistic thing). Then he was commissioned to write six episodes. They got abandoned after three because of a strike. What Gareth Roberts has done here is write a novel based on all he could get hold of with those scripts. Unfortunately I found that the combination was lesser than the sum of its parts. It's well written, but not as brilliant as I might have hoped. The story is quite slow, but not tedious and the ending doesn't disappoint. Maybe just for fans only.

Why am I even wondering about this? Let's start back when I was a young teenager in the late 70s. There were four music papers around then: (from memory) Melody Maker, Sounds, Record Mirror and the NME. A friend of mine subscribed to Record Mirror. On the letters page there was discussion about mods and rockers; this was the first time I'd heard the terms. I didn't know anyone who would fall in either camp, but being rural Lincolnshire this isn't a surprise. Another friend was embarrassed to discover that his dad used to be a Teddy Boy. Although his dad was middle-aged then, I did the maths and it was entirely plausible that he was a teenager at the right time. The music I listened to and liked around then was the Specials and Madness, and not Shakin Stevens. If someone had made me choose then I would have said Mod. When we moved to our current house and I was no longer able to walk to work, as I had done for almost all of my previous working life up that point...