Manic pixie dream crone

A dull green frog with white lips and chin sitting half out of the water on top of a smaller, browner frog, clearly mid-spawn.

The frogs were very frisky today.

Herein my biggest beef with the Peter Jackson films: Faramir would *never*, how very dare he.

I also wonder if there's a slight (unconscious?) gendered element given which kind of people are most likely to have pockets that lanyards/ID cards can be concealed in.

Q: What do you call a Mercian king who offers a 50% discount on multiple purchases?
A: BOGOFFA

They were very beneficial for the kids who got in and opened up higher education to lower-middle and working class grammar school pupils, but the ones who failed were basically written off academically.

The privilege of actually being able to get into your office? (I am not a fan, but with automatically closing card-entry doors it's the best way of making sure I have my card with me and don't get locked out.)

Mind you, mine isn't a university-branded lanyard, it's a Doctor Who scarf one I got on etsy.

I never wore one in our old building because we had old fashioned doors with actual locks and keys. I wear one in my new building because it's the most reliable way of making sure I don't leave my card on my desk and get locked out of the office when going to the loo.

Q: What do you call a Mercian king who has reduced his prices?
A: Special Offa

Country diary: This is the field where spring arrives first | Nicola Chester Inkpen, West Berkshire: Its display of crocuses is the largest in the country, and it has a venerable history – but what kind of history, nobody quite knows

On a day where the news is just awful, have a little escape to a funny, wild little crocus field, that’s been loved and around for centuries.

Except to measure out our lives in.

That's grim. Why are people?

This!

This is such a simple but also amazingly revelatory thing.

Look, I'll just say it: centrism is basically being right-wing at heart, but still having the decency to be ashamed of it. You know what you *want* to do, but you also know your kids will stop talking to you if you admit it.

Reacting to Labour's devastating loss to the Green Party in Gorton and Denton, Keir Starmer claims that only Labour can unite communities. I agree. He convinced Muslims to vote for a white working class woman representing a party led by a gay Jewish man.

Generally not too bad (we have them in our kitchen), but it depends on placing. Yesterday I was at a meeting in a double-height room with a strip of LEDs running around below the balcony level so basically cutting across the mid-point of my view and that was utterly grim.

Happy birthday to Ozzy! His existence has significantly brightened the last 12 months for so many of us.

I am definitely three ferrets and an owl in a trenchcoat.

A bright green bird with a red bill (rose-ringed parakeet) perches at the end of a branch on a tree covered in pink flowers.

A bit of lunchtime colour #birds

Not in the UK, unfortunately.

I have heard so many good things about that but I don't think it has a UK publisher (and I prefer reading fiction as ebooks).

I don't think it was won, UCL settled, though I have no idea why. IANAL, but surely force majeure would apply?

This makes me absolutely furious. Nearly 5 years on from the end of restrictions, I'm still deep in burnout from the effort of trying to move everything online and keep things running as best we could. Everyone in HE was working unbelievably hard and this is just such a fucking kick in the teeth.

(Mossa and Pleiti are the Malka Older novellas. Her Infomocracy series is great too but older.)
Oh, and A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys.

Martha Wells' Murderbot books (unless being made into a TV series rules them out?)
Aliette de Bodard's Xuya universe books - Navigational Entanglements and The Tea Master and the Detective are my favourites
Seconding Some Desperate Glory and Mossa and Pleiti
Lady Eve's Last Con - Rebecca Fraimow

I *did* break myself during the Lockdown, trying to keep students sane, learn entirely new skills, change courses to enable online learning, provide so much pastoral care, etc. etc.

This entitled consumer behaviour is deeply insulting to all the work staff were made to do, and those lawfirms are 🤬

Oh, bums.

Does your insurance include windscreen cover? Because if it was me I think I would just go for a roadside replacement service.

So The Raven Scholar is absolutely as good as everyone said it was, and I'm now desperate for the rest of the trilogy.

(Though, petition to stop people calling books 'The Raven X', there are *so many* and it's hard to keep them all straight in my head.)