Quin Parker

A small confession – I haven't technically moved to Toronto. I'm about 25 miles southwest of Toronto, in a city called Mississauga, part of the Greater Toronto Area. And for somebody who has just landed from England in the past week, it may as well be Neptune.

Wine from plastic glasses in the park is no more. Getting on a train in the morning and eating croissants by lunch by the Musée d'Orsay – no longer...

Also, I seem to have burnt myself somehow with a freezing cold high pressure air duster. Read more

Here is a brief list of things that I learned in the past month and a half, where Santa's brain possessed my computer and demanded to be fed blog entries instead of posting them here and I only managed to destroy his mind when I started reposting things from Little Green Footballs.

Rejoice and hail, as our glorious Benefactor has brought back into the hands of the people another important public service. His decisions to liberate Northern Rock, then free Lloyds TSB and HBOS for the enjoyment of the populace, were already far-sighted and wise. Now the final few stages of nationalisation are complete

The evolution of superbugs has hit a whole new height, according to the Daily Mail

I see a lot of movie posters, and I've noticed an increasingly large number of the ones that show cast ensembles also show animals that act as important plot points. For instance, in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Simon Pegg (as Toby Young) pretends to bring Babe the Sheeppig to a party. Hence, the pig is important enough to be in the poster. These film-poster animals got me looking around the internet to see if any really great movies of the past twenty-five years employed the same tactics in their marketing -- putting important animals into the posters. Do you know, I found quite a few.

This morning, I was running out the door too fast for breakfast, so I bought some porridge from a street vendor.

Isn’t that something that wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago?

Kebab vans, ice cream trollies, they’re all twentieth century now. This milllenium is all about the porridge, and the carrot juice, and the general healthy breakfast treats bought for a small handful of pound coins in a major railway station.

The porridge I bought had chopped dates and walnuts in. Chopped dates and walnuts! That’s true oatmeal sophistication. I ate it on the bus.

I believe there’s a market for this ‘going too fast for your morning routine’ business. In five years’ time, I expect to see street vendors who will brush your teeth for you while putting your shoes on. I’m going on Dragons’ Den. Watch me.

Old man is coughing
into City AM, like
mist on a grey lake.

This train is formed of
only four coaches. Squashy
Like red grapes on vine.

Spraying lumps of soil and turf everywhere, this blog is finally hauling itself out of the grave. Now it is sitting up, blinking, and thinking about something squishy for breakfast.

If you lived here you would be home by now is the old title of the very first blog I had back in 2001, when Web 2.0 was still Web 0.2b, and Flickr was just, um, a flicker in somebody’s eye. IYLHYWBHBN (catchy!) went on to win an award, get a runner-up spot in a top UK blogs thing by the Guardian, survive one quite good redesign and two quite bad ones, then get locked out of its own database and die.

Now it’s back, and is unwrapping its bandages.