Hey, look at that. My connection has stayed alive three mornings in a row. Which is handy, with me working on weekend time for two of them, and forgetting to check on my way out again this morning.

[CdM, MF, matt] O.k. I see it now - and as you say, it does have a certain elegance. My only quibble with is really is that it is a bit two-staged, in that <hidden_bit>one has to get to "bra in wash" as a reason for the bust to be down, and normally such two-stage clues are inadmissable. Like having to find a word and then anagramise it. I've seen it done, but it does cause confusion IMHO</hidden_bit>

The distinctive feature of the "bust down reason" clue is that the entire clue is simultaneously the definition and the cryptic indication, instead of them being separate halves.

[Blob] I think this what Manley calls "A clue to a clue"; but didn't you know you can excuse anything with a question mark. In any case as Raak and Darren point out, it's an &lit clue. This type of clue is what people entering the Azed clue-writing competition usually aim for. Often with disastrous consequences, as it's extremely difficult to get a clue that is both crossword-grammatically correct and furnish a sound definition of the whole.

The obscure vault has been opened, probably to the relief of the uninterested.

But what shall we talk about, now?

No fluffy clouds here today.

Dark here now.

I dropped crunchy nut cornflakes and milk in my keyboard this morning. :o(

[pen] Whoops.

Meanwhile I'd like to point out, though I will suspect none will care, that the 'Extended overhaul' of the DJ Shadow track 'Organ Donor' (on the Preemptive Strike compilation) is a triumph.

I had Froot Loops for breakfast this morning. mmmm sugar.

PUBLIC HEALTH WARNING.

On wednesday, newly qualified Dr Lib and hundreds of her Doctor friends are being let out onto the British public at large, allegedly to make them better. It is your duty to do us all a favour and avoid getting admitted to hospital (preferably for ever! but if you must get ill then at least wait a week or two so the new baby doctors will have had chance to work out whats going on). I thank you all for reading this announcement and wish you all the best of health.

Not the best time to have my knee go dodgy while working out, then?

Tuesday is the day that our Chickens arrive. We'll be trotting over to Craven Arms in Shropshire (sounds like a pub but isn't) to collect them. Hooray!

[Btd] Egg-sellent!

Having made it all but three steps into work this morning, a lump of purple shit fell out of a tree and landed on my (of course) clean white t-shirt. I've spent several minutes in the gents scrubbing it like crazy and am now back in my office on one of the hottest days of the year with the fan heater blasting out in a vain attempt to make the slightly-less-stained shirt less moist. Of course, now the heater has cut out, deciding it to be way too hot. Grrr...

I could stand out in the sunshine, but then at the risk of burning my poor head...

[Rab] I concur. As I have stated before: Summer = evil.

[BtD] Which are you getting first? The chickens or the eggs?

[BtD] I'd love to keep chickens. Are they RIRs or fancy ones with feathered legs?

[BtD] So they're LIVE ones - what fun! I 'did' bantams for one rather rustic year when I was younger and foolish enough to want to impress a potential husband [animal husbandry pun obligatory].

[Chalky] But did it work?!! We need to know these things! Is it worth investing in half a dozen chickens and a hutch or is my money better spent on posh underwear?

Someone's shat on the furcation game? Do we want it reinstated? I guess that's aimed at Martha Farquar really.

The subject of the aiming being the question about reinstatement, not the shitting. Just to be clear.

[pen] I think the chickens would definitely look better in a hutch than in posh underwear.

[penelope] I went all fickle, ran off with a drummer in a folk-rock band and as I recall, the posh underwear was quite unnecessary. hehehehe.

There must be some joke about both drummers and chickens having drumsticks . . . .

My colleague has just accepted another job - we've been running a PR programme together for the past five and a half years and now... eeeeek!!! *sees her holidays disappearing into the mist as the workload piles up while someone else is appointed*

[rab] Careful you don't stain your white T-shirt.
[penelope] That's a bit of a bummer. So - this PR malarkey? Could any one do it?

[Chalky] Yup. Any dipstick can do it. As long as you're smarter than the average, have newspaper experience, can tell the difference between a good story and a bad one and be able to tell the client exactly what you think and hold your temper when they disregard everything you say, be able to turn a phrase or two and don't mind having red pen through your work every now and again.

Sorry about the brief closure (if anyone noticed it). Just reinstating The Furcation Game at Projoy's request. There'll be no need to close the station for such essential maintenance when I roll out the next major upgrade, sometime in 2008 (subject to Government funding).

[rab] Ah yes, those long-awaited updates... you will recall how long it took me to finish the code that fixed the "this game is too long" problems, and similar longeurs have affected exactly the kind of admin screens which I suspect you are talking about (well, not strictly true - I did write the necessary admin screens at the same time as String itself, but they've never worked). The urgency of the whole random Lock Cup game creation fiasco thing is making me work rather more rapidly on logins, which is really about minimising the amount of work I have to do in removing the detritus.

[Dunx] At the risk of Checking My Oats, the grand scheme is to move from a flat-file storage system to a mySQL back-end. Then I can use an off-the-shelf frontend (with appropriate security cauliflowers enabled to prevent any old Jack coming along and dropping his spade) to do the tweaks when required. It will also remove a shed-load of concurrency issues and, in principle, provide better data integrity, removing the need for having a+w mods on parts of the server (evil). Currently (i.e. on the [not-]working version) the front page is converted: just need to do the creation page (easy) and the thread page (hard) before it's done. Hence the 2008 ETA.