An Arquebus That Was Used at Waterloo

Maybe I'm just really a conservative in everything and resistant to all change, but I think this all looks wretched with the new font, which normally doesn't to me seem tremendously different from Times (although I admit to being one of the seven people in the world that reads the little page in every book about fonts and typeset and the lonely man who does it).

It does seem a great deal easier to read, though (check out the now-totally-garish but still-as-sad-as-ever Counter below! yipes! it makes my failure at fame the much more obvious; all the more it could do would be to blink the sad stats in a glitter-ridden pink!), and as I was just telling the mother, some time in the next five or ten years I'm going to consider applying for corrective eyewear (ooh, wait, convene strategists and deliberate: not if Sarah Palin is just beginning her second term as President; although waitwait, I should by then have adapted to a different updo or shaved These Ebon Locks (As glossy as a heron's wing/Upon the turban of a king) (which o'erspread my youthful neck/ my cheeks a bashful red) altogether, and everyone will be as appalled with her as they are of any second-term incumbent, even if they voted for him/her twice, so no connection will necessarily be made between my deteriorating eyesight and the former governor of Alaska's accessorizing and grooming tendencies).

Anyway, I think all the words look really big, as though I mean what I say and wish to be aggressive about putting it forward.

All I wanted was a bloody cedille. Not a revolution. Of course the fact that the links list is now so obstreperous makes me feel as though I have to address the fact that some don't even link to the main page but some 'August 2005' recap of something or other that was well and duly settled by March of that year if not before.

I want this blog to be pleasing to the eye much as my home is, but with my home I bring in or take away stuff, or move a stuff to place it didn't use to be and in which its presence will be more felicitous than previously. I am not, in other words, reduced to 'formatting' in the case of stuffs and house. In the case of this accursed blog, in marked contrast, I do not have the option of simply moving a jardinière or flower arrangement closer to the screen and a bit to the left or right; I have to do all sorts of soul-destroying things to the code of the copy of the image of the photo of the vase (or something equally geneological and even less-well understood), cross my fingers, cross myself, feveredly pound a glass of a dangerous Barolo, and stare at the screen in abject and unholy fear while holding my breath and pressing 'enter,' 'save,' or another similarly ridiculous copulatory or soteriological command, none of which verbs I particularly wish to engage in with a computer.

I feel in matters technological not unlike Noël Coward's beleaguered Colonel Montmorency felt with regard to his Home Guard troops' lack of necessary materiel. Except there is no superior to whom I might even vainly address my petitions. There's just me, and some really huge type. And the song is admittedly a lot better when sung, and most particularly when it's Coward himself doing the singing. But if I can't even format a blog to conform to my wishes, I most assuredly cannot conjure Mr. Coward sitting at my piano and killing me softly with his stirrup-pump.


'...Poor Colonel Montmorency tried, at infinite cost to time and pride
To tackle his superiors again;
Having just one motorbike, fourteen swords and a marlin spike,
He wrote the following letter in the following urgent strain:

Could you please oblige us with a Bren gun?
We need it very badly, I'm afraid.
Our local crossword solver has an excellent revolver,
But during a short attack on the fort, the trigger got mislaid.

In course of operations planned for Friday afternoon
Our orders are to storm the Hippodrome,
So if you can't oblige us with a Bren gun
The Home Guard might as well go home.

Could you please oblige us with a Bren gun?
The lack of one is wounding to our pride.
Last night we found the cutest, little German parachutist:
He looked at our kit, and giggled a bit, and laughed until he cried.

We'll have to hide that armoured car when marching through Berlin;
We'd almost be ashamed of it in Rome.
So if you can't oblige us with a Bren gun,
The Home Guard might as well go home.'