A quick, perhaps egotistic, documentary post to note that the Guardian have published their top 10 posts of 2011 and the piece I wrote with Jennifer M. Jones made the cut. Indeed, 6 months after it was written, "Angry Young Academics" has returned to being the most read item on the site with 366 Facebook "likes" and 77 unique mentions on Twitter.

I thought it would be a good idea (New Year's resolutions and all that) to make sure I was on top of my finances this coming year. For that purpose, I began to investigate options to aggregate my accounts in one place. There were several online options, but I really disliked the idea of giving an online service my banking credentials.

A guest piece over at the Guardian Higher Education section: Secondary schools are not adequately preparing students for higher education Featured image by ChrisM70 under a CC-BY-NC-ND license. P.S. I've just noticed that the version on the Guardian is far more businesslike and brusque in tone.

An update on my earlier posts about meXmlGalley, the OJS plugin that allows you to publish PDFs from XML source documents, to say that I began some further work today to begin integrating image support. Thus far, it's working very well in PDF form!

This is a brief, and perhaps pedantic, post to bring attention to an essay of extreme prominence in Pynchon studies, Anne Mangel, "Maxwell's Demon, Entropy, Information: The Crying of Lot 49", Triquarterly 20 (1971): 194-208. (Future reference will be to the reprinted version Mangel, Anne.

This short piece provides the cumulative textual evidence that Pynchon consulted a single source, Golder, F.A., 1915. "The Russian Fleet and the Civil War". The American Historical Review, 20(4), pp.801-812, to construct the historicity of the Peter Pinguid Society episode in The Crying of Lot 49 , as opposed to consulting the original Arkhiv Morskogo Ministerstva, Dielo Kantseliarii Morskogo Ministerstva, no. 91, pt. III., pp. 102, 103.

Of the worthy causes you'll see in the world, War Child is surely high up that list. For the uniformed: Well, now you have a chance to support this cause and to also see the musical genius that is Leftfield live while doing so. Leftfield have been, for over ten years now, the defining music in my life. In the early nineties they fused dub and house music to craft, alongside The Chemical Brothers and Orbital, the musical shape of the decade.

As surely everybody on Twitter now knows, a certain multi-million pound contractor to the BBC (therefore paid out of public funds) has shot his mouth off with a statement that those on strike should be "shot". It was, to provide context, supposed to be humorous.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. 1st ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 (first print: 1944). (p. 30) Featured image by ChrisM70 under a CC-BY-NC-ND license. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2011 was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on December 02, 2011.

At last, the First Fictions launch weekend, featuring Ian Rankin, Nicholas Royle, Bryan Talbot, Elleke Boehmer, Adam Roberts and many others is available for booking! First Fictions launch weekend: 20-22 January, 2012 was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on December 01, 2011.

Update : Due to my university teaching timetable changing, unfortunately the Wordpress workshops have been postponed. I'll update this post as and when new times are available. A quick promotional post for two upcoming workshops that I am running at the University of Sussex. Book fast, places going already! All workshops can be booked online and are free of charge to Sussex students.