Weird sentence of the day:
‘Longevity of tenure is further supported by Southworth (2006) who cite a traditional period of 20 years to harvest a headteacher’
in D Barrett-Baxendale, and D Burton, ‘Twenty-First Century Headteacher: pedagogue, visionary leader or both?’ In School Leadership and Management

(also known as ‘crash blossoms‘, as Lauren the Linguist tells me)
From The Age:
Anger over release of man convicted of murdering doctor shot dead on footpath.
Hmm. Can you murder someone who’s already been shot dead?

Taken from Toby Litt’s Hospital:

The boy stumbled out of the shower of the 14th floor stairwell, now thick with panicking, escaping people.

(Why yes, apparently I do only read books with red and white covers)

From The Age:
Police hunt knife-wielding milk bar bandit
I guess there’s always a bad egg — even amongst milk bars.

I guess the young woman in this picture is called 99% Fat Free Special K? With a name like that, I bet she got teased at school. . .

From, as usual, The Age:
A Paris laboratory found the left-hand fingerprint on the work drawn in ink and chalk in January and established that it was “very similar” to one found on a da Vinci work in the Vatican, said laboratory director Jean Penicault on Tuesday.
Well, given that it was apparently only drawn in January, [...]

Sentence of the day:

‘In the present study, inter-scorer reliability based on 28 definitions, 2 definitions per word randomly chosen from all children in our sample, resulted in a kappa of .96’

I realised I wasn’t the target audience for this article when I read ‘kappa’ and thought instantly of the open-skulled Japanese monster.

The ebook version of Paper Cities (through Senses Five Press) has gone live on Amazon. It’s a great collection containing short stories by authors such as Kaaron Warren, Ben Peek, Jay Lake, Cat Sparks, and, er, me.

Taken from an article by K Sewell et al, Journal of Education for Teaching, Vol 35 No 1:
‘She felt unable to express her views to her tutor as she felt pressurised into being positive about the course’

Ouch!

Dr Elizabeth Blackburn, who pioneered the study of telomeres, has become the first Australian woman to win a Nobel Prize.
I even know what telomeres are, thanks to Scott Sigler’s Infected and Contagious, which I’ve been listening to on my walks to and from work. And who says that sci fi about terrifying triangle monster diseases [...]