My friend Glenda Larke is in the UK at the moment. Today she had cause to drive through Somerset (very wisely not stopping along the way). During her journey she discovered evidence that Somerset is about to enter the 19th Century. Yes, we are going to get steam trains! Here’s proof.

Goodness only know how something that heavy will manage on the wooden trackways that connect the villages in the cider swamps, but doubtless the government has some cunning plan in mind.

Apologies for the lack of April Foolery here this year. It has a lot to do with my being up until 2:00am with Day Jobbery.

Other people have been doing a fine job of compiling hoax round-up posts (notably Andrew Wheeler), so I won’t do one here. I will say, however, that the funniest thing I have seen so far this year was a fearless expose of a hoax. If you want to see absolute proof that NASA faked the moon landings, go here. (Thanks MEG!)

Of course I should also add that we in the UK don’t really need April Fool jokes. Why bother with hoaxes, when we have The House of Lords instead.

You can all blame Nick Harkaway for this. He found it first.

For an explanation (as if you would be happy with anything so mundane), see the Daily Telegraph.

So, what’s the caption? This cries out for the LOLcat treatment.

If you needed any proof that the world is a very small place, here it is. I’ve had email from someone in California asking me to drum up an audience for some Scottish comedians (well, one comedian with two hands) performing in Farnham. I speak, of course, of the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre (no, I’d never heard of them before either) who will be appearing at the Farnham Maltings on Feb. 25th. Apparently ticket sales have been really slow for this gig, but not for others on the tour. And you know, they really are very funny. Here (sadly unembedable) they are doing Star Wars.

Other people have already linked to this, but Ben Goldacre’s snark is so magnificent that I can’t resist adding to the traffic.

That this pattern could occur simply because one site was on the way to the next was not considered. Mr Brooks has proven, he explains, that there were keen mathematicians here 5,000 years ago, millennia before the Greeks invented geometry: “Such is the mathematical precision, it is inconceivable that this work could have been carried out by the primitive indigenous culture we have always associated with such structures… all this suggests a culture existing in these islands in the past quite outside our expectation and experience today.” He does not rule out extraterrestrial help.

Glorious.

Via Mary Robinette Kowal I have discovered a short TV program from Iceland that is most definitely not work safe but is very enlightening on the subject of why we should all be having sex with elves.

Dear me, surely this is the sort of thing we expect from the Daily Malice? But no, it is the Guardian Book Blog. They have a post up encouraging commenters to vent about how much they hate hobbits and elves.

Of course the headline might be the work of an over-enthusiastic sub-editor. Andrew Brown, the author of the piece, appears more interested in encouraging people to dump on the literary skills of Professor Tolkien.

Still, interesting that they didn’t mention dwarves, eh? And goodness only knows what it is the comments. I’m not going to look. There are way too many of them already.

Of course this also shows how easy it is to generate a successful blog post simply by asking readers to vent about something or someone that has been hugely successful.

… some guy pays $330,000 of real money for a virtual space station.

Mashable has the full story.

Why did the guy spend so much money? Well, the place in question is a giant virtual hunting lodge in which guys with laser rifles get to take down ferocious alien animals. I guess they’ll be paying a lot for the privilege.

It could be worse. At least it wasn’t a brothel.

As I’m doing all of the seasonal nonsense I might as well go the whole hog. What was I doing this time ten years ago? Writing Emerald City, of course. Issue #52 was out in time for the Solstice, and included my own take on the Millennium, a tongue-in-cheek broadcast from Anglo Saxon Chronicle TV on the eve of the year 1000. Here it is again (safely under the cut for the benefit of those who value their sanity.)
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For those of you who like your holiday celebrations to be tinged with tentacles, the excellent John Holbo has been busy once more. See here for more like that below, including a magnificently gibberworthy filk of “The Night Before Christmas”.