fisharepeopletoo

The Twos

Fantasticness

Isn't this fantastic.

Recommended Reading

"If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:    

1. What am I trying to say?    
2. What words will express it?    
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?    
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:    

1. Could I put it more shortly?    
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

I think the following rules will cover most cases:    

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.    
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.    
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.    
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.    
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.    
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

Save Our Twos

Let's give The Finger the Vs

Who's The Daddy Now?

A sheet of City Poems stickers, launched February 2003.

Text the key number 25 to 07919 315556, and get a free poem back to your mobile phone.

Most of the City Poems signs were specific to a place - you're in North bar in Leeds, you get poems about regretting the night before, or hoping to meet someone, or hoping not to meet someone - but 25 are general purpose poems, which means we could claim any location for City Poems.

Even though I'm too much of a goody two shoes to actually stick them very many places, we're down to the last few sheets.

So here they are, for the record.

Lisa's Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Organ

I'm just basking in reflected glory here, it's all Lisa's work.

Edinburgh film festival for its first meeting with the world, to distribute the Pocket Shorts films. (That's the plan anyway. I don't want to tempt fate.)