When I was young, before your World Wide Webs and your Twitters, we used to have ‘newsgroups’—kind of Internet discussion forums. They were named like domain names, with dots: rec.arts.cycling, say, or alt.tv.muppets.

I subscribed to the Muppets one, and a few others, including alt.fan.pratchett and alt.fan.douglas-adams. Douglas Adams (dns) used to pop in and say hello on his one occasionally (which was always promptly followed by a raft of newbies accusing the great man of being an imposter).

I’ve been pretty remiss about checking my comment queue for the last year, so quite a few comments were sitting waiting there unapproved. Fixed now. I probably should make this thing email me when people post comments. Probably.

I was at a Burns Supper last night (and my hangover is only beginning to subside as I write), for which I was asked to give the Immortal Memory. I was only asked to do it last week, so it was a bit of a rush job (the tone and humour is uneven), but I learned a lot about Rabbie Burns.

For posterity, here is the text, not precisely as delivered of course. In fact it probably reads better than how I delivered it, since I did not have time to commit it to memory or work on the presentation. Continue reading →