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I have mixed feelings about creative writing courses, but Hanif Kureishi doesn’t:

“One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student.”

I recently gave a talk to some Creative Writing students. They seemed nice, if mad – but in roughly the same proportions as professional writers, so probably for the good. I may stand before them again. Kureishis’s hypothesis, therefore, struck me as worth testing.

Wikipedia’s index of School Shootings lists a total…

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Tom pointed to this hilarious/depressing news story about the National Lottery’s ‘Cool Cash’ scratchcard:

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

The worst part is that Camelot (the company that runs…

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Quite possibly the best thing ever. Do not watch if offended by language, or without headphones in a busy place. Do watch if interested in increasing literacy rates. And booty.

The video is a product of BET, the ‘black interest’ US cable channel, who deserve utter praise for such a forthright and downright hilarious approach. It has, quite predictably, caused a bit of a furore across the pond due to it’s supposed negative stereotyping of black youth. It’s satire. It has a message. People will get the message. Acting on it is up to them. (Via Print Is Dead).

Booktwo.org, always up-to-date with the latest online literary microtrends, is proud to bring you a new subgenre: Google fan fic (or should that be fear fic?). Enjoy.

Google Interiors by Sandra Niehaus:

I realized with a shock that George’s hat was a dense cluster of tiny cameras, forming a rounded beehive of angled, glittering eyes. “We’re from Google Interiors, a new venture sponsored by Google to make every home interior in the world searchable on the internet.”

Robot Exclusion Protocol by Paul Ford:

“Hi! I’m from Google. I’m a Googlebot! I will not kill you.”

I saw the best minds…

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