The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Emil:

Doug - it's pretty much what you might expect. Where I work, a handful of top-selling titles subsidize a much bigger handful of underperforming titles. The rest of the books come in on forecast (meaning they're earning their keep themselves.) Our bestsellers, typically, are by authors who were in the latter two categories for a good few years building sales and reputation (Dan Brown didn't come out of nowhere, I suspect.)

Ahoy there, Mr Ford, you infernal bugger! Jump down to the orlop and write me out some more PO'B novels.

You do a set of exams called GCSEs at 16. The next two years, you do A-Level exams or a vocational qualification or leave school entirely, but your GCSE results have no bearing on that, it's just personal choice. Your A-Level results determine whether you get into university.

Righto. I shall pop down to the corner shop for a tenn'orth of shotgun shells.

A British Pakistani friend of mine has been stopped three times now by police, driving to work, since the 7th; there's certainly some amount of racial profiling going on, although how many suicide bombers disguise themselves as pin-stripe-suited lawyers I don't know.

What I can't get my head around is the idea that there were thirty or so armed police staking out, not a flat, but a block of flats - at least thirty or so residences - tailing the first person who pops out of there in bulky clothing, and allowing him to make his way all the way to a Tube station. This doesn't seem like a particularly good sort of operation to me (but what do I know...?)

By the way, in response to Clark Myers' I'd rather live with an armed populace and a level of violence than make violence a state monopoly - we have a level of gun violence here, too, but at least it's pretty hard to get hold of the guns in the first place. The only reason we have armed police is that people increasingly manage to do so.

Now and again we get these terrible situations where an unarmed man is shot dead on the street, or in his bed, or on the Tube, by twitchy and poorly-briefed police. We don't get the terrible situations where a child finds their dad's pistol and shoots dead their playmate, or any of the domestic horrors that an armed populace has to tolerate. Somehow we seem to have avoided the Stasi so far.

I don't believe any form of vigilantism, armed or otherwise, is going to be the answer to what we're facing in the UK right now.

Seems the man shot at Stockwell was not connected to the bombings after all: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4711021.stm

Overwhelming reaction of us Londoners is: nice to have completely incompetent suicide bombers.

Please can we have one in the style of The Book of the New Sun...? "Memory oppresses me. Having been reared among the Dursleys, I never knew my mother and father..."

Mobile phone networks in London were jammed earlier in the day, but the text (SMS) network seems to be holding up. A good way to contact a batch of people without using up too much bandwidth.

Too easy but:

General Abacha's
defunct
        who used to
        ride a watersmooth-silver
                                 Merc
and stash onetwothreefourfive millionsjustlikethat
                                 Jesus

he was a handsome man
                      and what I want to know is
how do I reach your greenback cash
Mr Mark

Re Lorem Ipsum...

"But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born."

Please do, Whitehouse.org, it'll explain a lot about the Bush administration...

The great Georges Perec wrote a whole novel patterned after the Knight's Tour puzzle - La Vie Mode D'Emploi.

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