Dateline: )ctober 25th. Target is selling Christmas (sorry, ‘Holiday’) CDs. Please join me in a sorry shake of the head, while reading this tangentially related article from the Grauniad. Though please ignore the nonsense about half of kids aged 4 not knowing their names; what, they only respond to “Oy you!”?

Today is the 200th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar. A few choice snippets:

From the BBC:

The victory over Spanish and French fleets is being celebrated throughout Britain and commemorated in Spain.

The youngest Brit in the battle was 8, the oldest 68. One woman was involved officially, though it was not unknown for women to serve in secret at the time.

The ship that brought news of the victory back to Britain was the mighty HMS Pickle.

Today is John Peel Day, a celebration of the first anniversary of the Godlike genius’s last broadcast. In honour of that event, here’s a quote from the man himself:

He once said: “I’ve always imagined I’d die by driving into the back of a truck while trying to read the name on a cassette, and people would say, ‘he would have wanted to go that way.’ Well, I want them to know that I wouldn’t.”

I’m not a celebrity junkie type, honest, but Andy pointed to a crappy bit of captioning on the Beeb’s website: “Holmes romanticised about marrying Cruise as a young girl”

1. “Romanticized about” – what? Technically the intransitive form of the verb can be used in this manner, but the transitive form is overwhelmingly more common and doesn’t allow for such a construct. She may have “fantasized about”, but would have “romanticized the idea of”. And it’s an ugly word anyway.
2. “Cruise as a young girl” – Some people thing Mr Cruise doesn’t get sufficient credit for his range as an actor. Perhaps, but this would be a stretch for anyone with lesser talents than Sir Alec Guinness, and even he would have been hard pressed to match the ‘young’ descriptor.
3. Even allowing for what the ‘journalist’ meant, as opposed to what was written, it’s misleading; it suggests that Ms Holmes is no longer a young girl.

Nicholas and Mrs Cage have just had a baby boy, called Kal-El Coppola Cage.

Yes, that’s right, Kal-El.