Slow News Day?

Well, with the announcement that the police were guilty of endangering the public over the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, you would expect a media frenzy. Calls for resignation, announcements of reform, all that sort of thing. That is happening, but you would expect it to be much more vocal, you would expect that the BBC News website would be full of new articles that are responding to the story, and that the general news-reading net citizen would be lapping it up.

Instead, just two minutes ago, the number one story read on the BBC News website for today was Excrement curry wife admonished. Now, don't get me wrong, I like to read stupid stories and read about the crazy ways that humans behave as much as the next person - but I'm amazed that this counts as news. What are we supposed to learn/get from this?

I had a meeting with my supervisor this morning, and barring a few cosmetic notation changes and corrections, and the inclusion of a small section on homomorphisms between certain rings of polynomials that chapter is done. I've started another one now, and so far this week I've expanded on the few notes that I had made to an 11 page document. It needs a lot of work, and I need to really define things more clearly, but the basic structure is there, so that's a start. I've got a bit of a cold today, so I'm giving the football a miss. I'll be playing badminton tomorrow afternoon though; my officemate and I used to play twice a week up until about six months ago, and this is the first time that either of us will have played in that time. When we stopped playing I had just got to the point where I could beat her, so here's hoping.

As I've said again and again this week, today is the start of National Novel Writing Month. When I go home tonight I will be sitting down at my computer, putting my writing glasses on and typing. I have a structure, I have a working title ("Who Killed Euler Smith?"), and I have a writing buddy at the university, which is pretty cool because I've never known anyone else who has gone for the challenge before. As challenges go it is fairly arbitrary, and the sense of achievement is fairly personal (no medals or ticker tape parade), but the feeling I got last year as I typed "THE END" was so good that I just knew I had to do it again this year.

I'll keep you posted on my progress.