Gizmotronic

Image by Edward Dullard via Flickr

I have been busy on a couple of fronts, so posting has been light (if not completely non-existent).

Work has been busy. It's busy time anyway and the current ongoing fiscal woo-ha is not helping. On the bright side, I still have a job. Small mercies.

At home, we are in the process of breaking in a new dog. Slow going, but rewarding in its own way. There's something about having a dog sleeping nearby that helps me to focus on work. As I type, the dog is indeed right here, snoring away.

On a technical front, I have upgraded my bare-bone cell phone for a spiffy new smart-phone. Right now, I'm still ironing out the bangs and figuring out where the whistles are kept. Ultimately, one of my intentions for it is to help me streamline the blogging process. I am using it now. Blogging as a stylistic genre is one of immediacy and I'm measured enough without having to wait however many hours or days before I can get to the interface and start.

Onward!

(Prior to posting this, I have popped the text into Zemanta and it has decided that I would like to add the lovely image that is now appearing above. It also suggests that I add Wikipedia links to the terms "cell phone," "snoring," and "ironing." I think that's great.)

Let's Plinth!

I am sort of facinated by the latest installation on the Fourth Plinth:

Every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break, different people will make the Plinth their own. If you’re selected, you can use your time on the plinth as you like – to demonstrate, to perform, or simply to reflect. One & Other is open to anyone and everyone from any corner of the UK. As long as you’re 16 or over and are living, or staying, in the UK, you can apply to be part of this unforgettable artistic experiment. Participants will be picked at random, chosen from the thousands who will enter, to represent the entire population of the UK. The rules are simple: you must stand on the plinth alone, for the whole hour; you can do whatever you want, provided it’s legal; and you can take anything with you that you can carry.

You can watch a live webcam from the One & Other site. As I started preparing this post it was 3:45 in the morning in London and the plinther was a woman dancing around dressed as a pigeon. Now it's a young man who looks like he might be sleeping.

My favorite that I've seen so far was a fellow who took the opportunity to pull out a sketch pad and start drawing the view.

curious

Over the weekend, Twitter apparently deleted a ton of accounts, and are now in the process of reinstating them.  (I believe that they came up with a faulty method of trying to detect spam blogs).

I logged into twitter.com on Sunday and was greeted with the "This is a deleted account" page instead of my own.  I then logged out, closed the browser, and opened twitter again.

There I was.  My account was active.

I have no way of knowing if I was deleted and then reinstated or if it was just a momentary glitch.  For some reason, this has been haunting me.  I don't know why that is.

Offered without comment.

July. I have plans for you.

Threepwood house.

I was stuck by this bit of info from the How Books Got Their Titles blog.

[Wodehouse took the name from] Emsworth, a village in Hampshire, and more specifically . . . a prep school in the town, Emsworth House, where PG Wodehouse stayed as a guest on and off from 1903. Wodehouse liked Emsworth so much that in 1910 he bought a house in the village called ‘Threepwood’.

If you know your Wodehouse, and me, I think you can see where this is going.

Emsworth is in the borough of Havant, so I took to their website to find more, and more could indeed be found.

Turns out Emsworth is the "culinary capital of the south of England."  Good to know, but how about that Threepwood House?

I found this bit in their charmingly titled "HAVANT BOROUGH TOWNSCAPE, LANDSCAPE AND SEASCAPE CHARACTER ASSESSMENT"

The writer and journalist P.G. Wodehouse came to Emsworth to visit a friend at a small preparatory school called Emsworth House. He became a schoolmaster here, and it is said that the quiet community in Emsworth suited him and he was able to produce a quantity of written work. From Emsworth School he moved into a property of his own known as Threepwood House on Record Road, which backed onto the grounds of Emsworth House. He lived in this property from 1904 to 1914, and it is now included on the List of Buildings of Local Interest. His stay in the area is marked by his use of local place names in his Jeeves and Wooster novels.

Paydirt!  Here is Record Road in Emsworth:


View Larger Map

Emsworth House School looks to be to the west of the lower half of Record Road, so we can presume that Threepwood House is there and most likely in private hands.  From this vantage point it looks surprisingly suburban an environment for Wodehouse to be living in, but it's hard to say how much things might have changed in the past century.

As an added point of interest, cast your eye to the northern end of Record Road and take a look at the front of the house directly across the street.  I am not certain at all, but it looks to me like someone's car has fallen into an enourmous hole where a driveway should be.

June Swoon

I was kicking around the idea of setting a goal of one post per day for the month of June, just to get myself back into the blogging habit.

Perhaps I'll start slower and try for July.