AdamSmith

Never heard of her before, but sounds irresistable... Is Amanda McKittrick Ros the worst novelist in history? There's a very strong case for the fruity prose of the 19th-century author who dreamed up Lord Raspberry and Lily Lentil Who can fail better? ... rubber stamp. Photograph: Andrew Paterson / Alamy Posted by Alison Flood Friday 19 April 2013 06.41 EDT guardian.co.uk I've played Ex Libris – well, our own free version – with my family every Christmas for years. I hate it, because I feel I should be good at it, and still never win. My everlasting thanks, then, to GalleyCat , for pointing me towards the discovery of a new literary competition with which – if I practise regularly – I'm planning to wipe the floor with them come December. Please forgive my ignorance, but I hadn't heard of Amanda McKittrick Ros until yesterday, and I feel I've missed out on years of fun. Apparently the worst novelist ever – and a quick glance at her work shows she can lay a lot more claim to the title than poor old Edward Bulwer-Lytton – the late 19-century writer was an obsession of Lewis, Tolkien and their fellow Inklings, according to Mark O'Connell's history of the worst things ever, Epic Fail. They would – and here is my plan – hold "sporadic Ros reading competitions, in which the winner was the member who could read from one of her novels for the longest without breaking into laughter". I haven't had a chance to read all of Irene Iddesleigh, or Delina Delaney – but believe me, I soon plan to rectify that. O'Connell provides some winning examples: "Eyes are 'globes of glare.' When their owners are unhappy, these globes are 'stuffed with sorrow'. Trousers are not trousers; they are 'the southern necessary'," he writes, before highlighting this extraordinary sentence from Delina Delaney: "She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness." (That is, Delina did some work as a seamstress so she wouldn't have to live off her father.)" It gets better. O'Connell tells us that "most of the characters in her last novel, Helen Huddleson, were named after fruits and vegetables (from aristocrats like Lord Raspberry and Sir Christopher Currant right down the social scale to Madam Pear and Lily Lentil the servant girl)". Here's the opener to Irene Iddesleigh – my mind is boggled: "Sympathise with me, indeed! Ah, no! Cast your sympathy on the chill waves of troubled waters; fling it on the oases of futurity; dash it against the rock of gossip; or, better still, allow it to remain within the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn," Ros writes. "Such were a few remarks of Irene as she paced the beach of limited freedom, alone and unprotected. Sympathy can wound the breast of trodden patience,— it hath no rival to insure the feelings we possess, save that of sorrow." Here's the first lovers' glance between Delina Delaney and Lord Gifford : "Could a king, a prince, a duke – nay, even one of those ubiquitous invisibles who, we are led to believe, accompanies us when thinking, speaking, or acting – could even this sinless atom refrain from tainting its spotless gear with the wish of a human heart, as those grey eyes looked in bashful tenderness into the glittering jet revolvers that reflected their sparkling lustre from nave to circumference, casting a deepened brightness over the whole features of an innocent girl, and expressing, in invisible silence, the thoughts, nay, even the wish, of a fleshy triangle whose base had been bitten by order of the Bodiless Thinker." Fleshy triangle indeed. I think I am falling headlong into a new obsession. Ros also loathed all her critics, calling them variously "bastard donkey-headed mites" and "clay crabs of corruption", asked her publisher if she should take a stab at the Nobel (thank you again Mark O'Connell for this gem: "What think you of this prize?" she asked. "Do you think I should make a 'dart' for it?"), and wrote fantastically awful poetry. Here's her "Verses on Visiting Westminster Abbey" : "Holy Moses! Take a look! / Flesh decayed in every nook! / Some rare bits of brain lie here, / Mortal loads of beef and beer." Anyway, it's clearly going to take some practice if I'm to win the Inkling game this Christmas, so I'm off to get reading. Join me, if you will, and share your favourite Ros nuggets below. Or do tell, if you think there's a better contender for worst ever novelist – but I will take some convincing. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/apr/19/worst-novelist-in-history

EXPAT, we extend our listening in sympathy and hope, our advice where we feel qualified, and above all maybe our gratitude that you -- and, by your reminder here, all of us -- feel among one another the sense of caring community that make these possible. You have done us as much a service as we could hope to do you. My deepest best wishes for whatever may lie ahead for you and your father.

And not to forget A Night to Remember, 15 April 1912, when RMS Titanic met her end. From tragic to absurd, occurs tax evaders don't much love April 15 either.

Nothing to do particularly with bumping uglies , just something I only now noticed, a bit more than a year after it happened: publication of the 5th & final volume of the monumental Dictionary of American Regional English... http://m.guardiannews.com/books/2012/jan/31/dictionary-american-regional-english-dialect ...I picked up Volume 1 years ago at a Harvard Square bookshop that sold, among much else, review copies of titles that professors had gotten gratis from publishers hoping for good notices, and would subsequently sell to this shop for resale. All that digression is just to explain how I could afford it at the time, as it was list-priced for libraries and rich folk. Anyway, that one volume has afforded years of pleasurable browsing, well captured in the article linked above.

Funny write up of a new serious-science study of this perennial question... http://us.cnn.com/2013/04/12/tech/social-media/apparently-this-matters-size?c=&page=1 Another report on same study, with images (don't get too excited): http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/04/the-final-word-on-penis-size.html

I was thinking! Getting an image of a dog's tongue out the window flapping in the wind.

Well, you know, sometimes could be just that many posters at the same time happen to have distractions that pull them away. I was just at a business conference that, refreshingly for once, did NOT drive me to my cell phone desperate for something more interesting than the event.

One of Boston's best journalists, doing his admirable best on a day that must be rending him. My 30 years living there -- no personal acquaintances were involved, but the toll on a city that this makes me realize I probably do love more than any other... http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/04/15/perfect-day-turns-evil/W7KQHq1NWFqukte3VQ14DJ/story.html

Hmmm... http://m.guardiannews.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/apr/16/da-vincis-demons-reinvents-leonardo P.S. This is rather more interesting: http://m.guardiannews.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/apr/01/leonardo-da-vinci-genius Also: http://m.guardiannews.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/nov/09/leonardo-da-vinci-drawings Und http://m.guardiannews.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/nov/09/leonardo-da-vinci-drawings

http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20080867,00.html http://christopher-mason.com/Christopher_Mason/Blog_Articles/Entries/2007/11/1_The_Ladies_Man__Remembering_Jerry_Zipkin.html

One can think of two or three available remedies. Which is in no wise to recommend them. Although the one I tried -- living in NYC, and fully letting it have its way -- pretty near worked.

If you can spy either Pitt, you have pretty good eyesight indeed. Or hindsight. Or something.

Not entirely inconceivable how you might momentarily confuse Dame Thatcher with William Pitt the Elder. The Queen, after all, was believed to have had a good bit of distaste for her.

Some believe it is not the youngster who is actually running things, but rather his old-guard aunt and uncle: http://article.wn.com/view-mobile/2013/04/08/Kim_Jonguns_aunt_Kim_KyongHui_and_uncle_Jang_SungTaek_callin/

So the 737, of all things, has some snags ('Sorry about this little snag, fellas' -- 2001): http://m.guardiannews.com/business/201O3/apr/15/boeing-737-faa-orders-inspection Not to beat needlessly on Boeing in general and the 787 in particular, but exactly as the above references, this issue of fasteners crops up again and again and again in mechanical engineering. See: Titanic, iron rivets holding steel body plates together, failure modes of (the RIVETS are what failed), in superchilled North Atlantic brine. Whoops.

In fact you were (one time) in those really striking electric-blue -- neoprene? -- shoes. You are admirably more fashion-forward than La Pelosi.

At the moment all is working normally on my iPhone. My spell checker just now said "working morally" but I don't think I'd go that far.

I didn't like the late Thatcher much at all but this extended obit from The Economist seems to do her about right: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21576094-now-especially-world-needs-hold-fast-margaret-thatchers-principles-freedom-fighter I can't quite believe myself saying that from a liberal knee jerk lefty stance, but I am. There must be several layers of psychopathology that I have yet to get to grips with.

Regrettably I suspect it is the latter. I am just now departing a technology conference where (ahem) I was one of the less slow-witted in attendance, yet we all showed our asses as little more than professional gasbags. Trying to sell consulting to engineers who are manifestly more knowledgeable about all the technical aspects than we are. The one, sort of pitiable in the grand scheme, thing we have of value to sell is advice about navigating the political minefields inside manufacturing enterprises, to help them do their thing better. You can see from that diagnosis why I am a little bit in a funk right now about the profession I chose.

A bad year for Jonathans, t'would seem. Frid likewise passed, just shortly after making a cameo in the Burton/Depp 'Dark Shadows' homage flick. He though was old and less than compos mentis of late, so a pity all around.

They hire personal shoppers. As should we all. .)

TY could be my avatar. I use FireFox on my (cursed!) laptop, the mobile version of Safari on ze iPhone. Same site hang up issues as reported by others of late.

I must say, from firsthand observation, you do remind somewhat of Mme Pelosi. I hope that is a compliment.