I usually joke that if
anyone looked at my internet browsing history, I’d very likely get locked up.
Research takes me to all kinds of strange websites, and hunting down weird bits
of information. This week has been no exception.
I’m also right up
against a deadline for the next Charlie Fox book, which is just reaching the
closing stages – the part where I’m really loath to tear myself away. So, I
thought I would share with you today’s browsing history.
The other reason for
this is that I recently had a reminder from fellow crime author Sarah Hilary
that entries for the Flashbang
Flash Fiction competition were just about to close. I’m one of the judges
for this, and have been for several years now. And the winner that still sticks
in my mind was Iain Rowan’s entry, Search
History from 2012. It went from ‘internet dating’, via ‘engagement rings’
and ‘wedding venues’ to ‘signs your partner is seeing someone else', ‘woodchipper hire’,
and finally back to ‘internet dating’ again.
I don’t think my
browsing history is quite that elegant, but at the moment I have tabs open on
my desktop for Google Maps, on which I’ve been investigating the overland route
between the port of Odessa on the Black Sea, Ukraine, and Borovets in the mountains
of Bulgaria, via Moldova and Romania.
Very useful to know it
was around 1060km, and would take at least fourteen-and-a-half hours, if nobody
wanted to stop to eat, sleep, or go to the loo!
I dragged the route
over a little because I particularly wanted to take my travellers through
Transnistra – the next tab I have open. Transnistra, also known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR), is a kind of semi-autonomous strip on the
western side of Moldova between the River Dniester and the Ukrainian border.
After the breakup of the USSR, it strove for independence, and a brief war was
fought over this in the early 1990s. It now has its own president, currency,
licence plate, national anthem and flag – the only one still to bear the Soviet
hammer and sickle. It has been recognised as an independent state by just three
countries, none of which are UN member states.
I have a page open
from the World
Nomads website discussing how safe Moldova is for tourists, and about
police corruption. Fascinating stuff.
A news item in The
Guardian recently caught my eye, about the new president’s intention to
increase spending on the military, but to cut budgets for other, equally vital
services, which may in the long run do more to keep the peace than a soldier
with a gun.
I was sent a link to
this TinyBuddha
blog by David deSouza
about small ways in which you can give back, including online mind games that
donate rice to charity – www.FreeRice.com
– and a Tamagotchi-style app called Forest
that allows you to cultivate a virtual tree by keeping off your mobile devices,
thus improving your time spent at work, actually working. And the nicest thing
is, apparently the people behind the app do actually go out and plant real
trees in relation to the number of ones you’ve virtually grown.
Another open page is The
Common Room blog on the Pterion, which is the area of the skull just behind
the temple, where four bones of the skull meet, creating a weak point. A
sub-cranial artery runs through this area, making it especially vulnerable to
attack.
And finally, a page
found via the AOL
news, on a story that women applying for a UK driving licence are obliged
to answer questions about their marital status, which are not asked of male
applicants. The item in question highlighted the problems on particular woman
had when she, too, asked for no title on her new licence, only for it to turn
up incorrectly labelling her as ‘Mrs’. It’s not so much the story that
interested me, as the comments below the piece, which gave away rather a lot
about the attitudes of the commenters. All useful research …
So, what would anyone
looking at your recent browsing history have found?
This week’s word of
the week is kakorrhaphiophobia, meaning an abnormal fear of
failure. It comes from atychiphobia,
meaning a fear of failure, but with the addition of kako, from the Greek for ‘bad’. So, really bad fear of failure.
Right,
back to my deadline!
