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skittledog

Listed below are comments made by skittledog between Thursday, 20th November 2008 and Tuesday, 18th August 2009.

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paper monitor 5:37pm on 18 Aug 2009 i cant help feeling that for this to have been a true test of our ability to read without any form of punctuation or imposed pauses paper monitor ought also to have forgone line breaks such that there was no way to enforce a sentence end on any reader

ofcoursethistheorytakentoitslogicalconclusionwouldalsodispensewithspaces
Modernising tradition 11:19am on 28 Mar 2009 Is anyone actually reading the poll that Mark linked to? It does show support for the monarchy as a whole:

"BBC News asked whether, after the end of the reign of the current Queen, Britain should continue with the monarchy, or become a republic.
Of those questioned, 76% said they would want Britain to keep the monarchy, against 18 per cent who said they would favour a republic. Some 6% said they did not know."

I agree the most important elephant in the room is why on earth the head of the monarchy should be the head of a religion these days anyway. I was brought up RC (nowadays just call myself Christian, not sure what) and remember when I was first in a CofE church and they prayed for the Queen and it seemed so backwards to me. When you're seeming backwards to a member of the most tradition-bound form of Christianity, it might be time for a rethink...
Are you an Office Evangelist? 3:42pm on 15 Mar 2009 Different people get recommendations in different ways. I certainly look around on the internet to see what is well-regarded and think about giving it a try, although such is my self-motivation that I've been thinking about watching The Wire for at least a year now and maybe will eventually do so when it shows up on the BBC. Maybe.

But having had another tv evangelist convince me to watch several of what are now my favourite shows of all time, I do try to spread the word whenever possible. I try to pick my targets, and my work doesn't have many people who would love the things I do, but I do feel a moderate sense of achievement at having convinced one co-worker to watch the modern Battlestar Galactica. Okay, I think he likes it for the explosions and sexy robots more than the deeper themes, but I'll take my successes where I can get them.
Caption Competition 12:47pm on 29 Jan 2009 Aslan!
Coming home 11:10am on 12 Jan 2009 I want to support Homecoming. I love Scotland, I miss it, and there are a number of reasons I'd love to come back on a more permanent basis than just a visit, but I'm not sure Homecoming will have any effect in my personal case. I'm not Scottish by descent (indeed, not even Scottish by birth, shock horror, but I grew up there from age 4 - 18 and even now am horribly homesick in this flat land of mud and suburbia they call the Midlands) - so the ancestry angle doesn't appeal; I grew up in Ayrshire surrounded by enough Burns-related stuff to saturate me for life; I don't play golf, I don't like whisky. The inventors/thinkers angle interests me, but then I think I probably covered most of those on school trips anyway...

And in the bigger picture, I don't want to risk moving back yet because my only work experience is in engineering and my engineer friends in Scotland have suffered in the jobs market of late. Perhaps that's selfish of me, but I'm okay here. For now.

So I may come home during the Homecoming year. I might even attend an event, if it happens to coincide with somewhere I want to be and something I'm interested in. But I feel like I represent part of the diaspora the government ought to be targeting - adults of working age who grew up in Scotland and are homesick for it, but have gone elsewhere in the years since. It worries me a little that there seems to be no effort at actually drawing people back for good. Tourism's great and all, but in 2010 it seems to me we'll be back where we were before.

(Oh, and I only know about Homecoming because of hanging around on the Scottish bit of this site. Have seen no promotion of it in England at all.)
The year we lost the kids 10:32am on 24 Dec 2008 Thanks for your reporting, Mark, and especially for this piece, which is balanced and fair in a way that so little of the hyperbolic reporting of teenage violence. I was shocked as I started to read that you and your cameraman had been attacked, but the understanding of why that happened (which you have) seems far more important to me than the blame assigned to pretty much everybody in the course of the comments here. Whether the importance laid on child abuse in the media is the root of all evils, I doubt, but I definitely agree we have a hugely dichotomous attitude to children in this country and it's bound to have a negative effect.

Anyway, thanks for being a voice of reason amongst all the hyperbolic doom-mongering.
Can Stephen Fry kill a gadget? 9:42pm on 27 Nov 2008 Anyone who can accidentally twitter using inappropriate parts of their anatomy (check out Mr Fry's tweets today) is someone I respect...

I think it is natural to listen to the advice of someone we all feel we 'know' - honestly, even the most qualified and accurate reviewer will only be successful if their audience have confidence in their opinions.

Oh and @no.8, Blythy_vxR - Argh, no thanks for linking that. Hurts my eyes. Why?!
Massive mortgage squeeze 10:21am on 25 Nov 2008 So when did records begin? I accept this will be a relatively unprecedented thing if it happens but I'm extremely doubtful of that 'never.'
Google - do you speak the Queen's English? 2:55pm on 20 Nov 2008 @camholder I changed my Facebook account to English (Pirate) and have been too amused ever since to care when I haven't got a clue what I'm clicking on any more...
Paper Monitor 2:26pm on 20 Nov 2008 I am sneezing and coughing at my desk today. Other more sensible colleagues have elected to work from home. Therefore, I am not feeling hugely sympathetic to Paper Monitor... but as my cold is reducing my attention span I need as many things on the internet to read as possible, so for purely selfish reasons I do indeed hope for a speedy return to monitoring form.

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