Caught out!

Woke feeling dreadful, throat sore and head full of bleariness. One ray of sunlight in this gloomy morning was the arrival of a care package from England, containing two books from Amazon and three DVDs from Go Faster Stripe.

The books were My Name Is Daphne Fairfax and New Model Army; the first has the most amateur cover I've seen in some time: the title and author's name have both been embossed, but the embossing has not lined up with the printing. It's about half an inch lower, which makes it look as though somebody has made a shadow of the words, but badly. And the more you look at it, the worse it looks. Almost to the point where you think it could just be a joke, until you realise that incompetence on behalf of the printer is a much simpler and more plausible explanation. You want to be careful with Occam's Razor, though. You could cut yourself.

New Model Army which has been printed in such a way that it just looks too big, without me being able to clearly justify that judgment. (It has a rather horrid looking cover, but this from Charles Stross suggests why that's the norm.)

I would give more details on these books, but when my fiancee saw them and realised I'd broken our two-month-old embargo on book and DVD buying, she flew into a rage, one that was not assuaged by taking her to XTC for gelato. Much was the shame heaped on me for failing to hold to a resolution, although in my defence most resolutions have fallen by the wayside long before the end of January, so for me to have lasted as long as I did is not *such* a terrible thing.

But hell hath no fury like a woman told not to purchase any new DVDs or books until we've been through everything we brought back from Canada. I thought of pointing out that nobody should have to read all the Scandinavian-terrible-crime-fiction (it's about terrible crimes, *and* it's pretty bloody terrible) ever to be translated to English, but that would have only exarcebated matters. So instead I'm cast into deep opprobrium for what I've done.

I did let her eat my fries when we went to Brat this evening, but that didn't make any difference. Oh woe is me. I guess I'll just have to plod through all the other old books before I achieve literary nirvana with these new ones.