Guinnevere, at Goodrich Village Hall

For anyone who retains some scepticism that I sing at folk clubs, here is a rather poor-quality video of our indifferent performance last night of the superb Crosby, Stills and Nash song Guinnevere, which you can hear on their first album. Or on YouTube. You should listen to that, not this:

I’m looking for Beta-testers for my Doctor Who book

My book The Eleventh Doctor will soon be complete as regards reviews — containing everything I’ve written up to and including the 50th anniversary special. I have only one episode to back-fill before that’s complete, The Name of the Doctor, which I plan to watch tonight and write about tomorrow.

Tentative frontispiece image for the Series 7 section of the book, based on a suggestion from Andrew Hickey. Original image CC BY-SA from Wikimedia Commons.

What I’ve been listening to in 2012

But Mike, 2013 is nearly over!

True; but I won’t be able to tell you until 2014 what I’ve been listening to in 2013, so this is the moment to publish my much-delayed 2012 list.

Last year, I did this across a sequence of twelve separate posts (introduction, ten individual albums starting here, and a summary). That felt like a bit of a slog, and half of the album posts garnered no comments at all; so this year we’re back to the more compact format that I used for the 2010 list.

Artwork for The Eleventh Doctor book

Regulars will remember from earlier this month that I’m writing a book about the  Eleventh Doctor. I’m really happy with the way the cover turned out, and also with this illustration that I put together for the introduction to the Series 6 section:

… Or maybe they’re doing web-site registration completely right

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that DeviantArt are getting web-site registration completely wrong by asking for the email address (which you can see as you type it) to be repeated, but not requiring confirmation of the password (which you can’t see).

A lot of people in the comments (both here and at Hacker News) pointed out that I was wrong.

Get your absurdly cheap Joni Mitchell box-sets

Wondering what to get yourself for Christmas this year? If you love music, then you should help yourself to this box-set of Joni Mitchell’s first ten studio albums at the frankly ridiculous price of £20.99 [at amazon.co.uk] or the slightly higher but still crazy $44.39 [at amazon.com].

How I nearly became Everton manager (1998)

Covering letter

Getting website registration completely wrong

I just got a Google alert that someone going  by the name of Teratophoneus on DeviantArt did rather a nice drawing of Brontomerus, one of the dinosaurs I co-described and named:

Saying goodbye to the first two charity spammers

I said last week that from now on, when I get spammed with physical begging letters, I will send the junk back to the originator in the pre-paid envelope, with a big STOP SPAMMING ME message scrawled over it. Here’s the first batch:

These are the first new charity spams to arrive since I did the big clear-out when I just junked the 40 or 50 that had accumulated. The one on the left (Carer’s Trust, rather irritatingly styled carerstrust) I’d never even heard of before. The one on the right I do have involvement with; but that is very specific and constrained, and they should never have used that as an excuse to send me unrelated junk mail.

I put there in the post a couple of days ago. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Announcing my book about The Eleventh Doctor

Coming soon to a bookseller near you!

It just happened that I started blogging about Doctor Who with Matt Smith’s inaugral episode, The Eleventh Hour. Now as we approach the end of Smith’s reign, and the handover to Peter Capaldi, it seems like an appropriate time to wrap it all up in a book that covers the entire Eleventh Doctor period.