New year resolutions

Readers will be happy to know that I am making progress towards the achievement of at least one new years' resolution.  The one about eating different types of vegetable.  For Christmas dinner (or as part of the salad anyway), I ate a nasturtium flower.  See the link below for more detail about this excellent plant:
http://www.gardening.net.au/nasturtium/
Mycroft can also report exposure to Culture over the holiday period, as he entered the world of Art House Cinema for the first time in a little while and saw the movie 'Albert Nobbs'.  Readers can inform themselves about 'Albert Nobbs' at the link below:
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/albert-nobbs-20111230-1pf2i.html
They can also read the original short story on which the film is based, as I did.  I must confess to not being able to recall many details of the short story, and was perhaps more entertained in a schoolboy kind of way by inventing different possible titles for the character of Albert Nobbs.  The character's desire to open a tobacconist offered rich possibilities in this regard, particularly if the character went into partnership with someone.  A straw poll of possible naming combinations revealed the following winners:
Nobbs-Handler
Door-Nobbs
Bigge-Nobbs
At which point some other combinations became too rude to appear in a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual blog such as this one.
According to some reviews of the movie, Albert's main problem is being too trusting.  I'm not so sure about this.  I suspect Albert's main problem was boring everyone in the vicinity into a gold plated, intergalactic-class stupor.  That's not to say the film is boring, only that the character Albert seems to have attained a new height in terms of the ability to bore.  If one looked up 'bore' in a dictionary there would be a picture of Albert Nobbs.  A clear opportunity is missed to link the film to the Sherlock Holmes franchise, by bringing in the great detective to investigate 'The Case of the Missing Personality'.  Ah well, one can dream.
 

Christmas again

What a year it has been.  It has to be admitted that I have not blogged as often as I should in 2011.  For 2012, it should be a daily event.  Mycroft Snooks conquers blogging!  Perhaps it won't be as dramatic as that but some progress has to be made. 

I've just finished reading Richard Blake's Sword of Damascus.  The first of Blake's novels I read was Conspiracies of Rome and they are interesting novels, set in the 600s around a crumbled Rome and struggling Constantinople.  There are four novels now, and the anti-hero Aelric is a Flashman-esque character.  A cad, man of action, scholar, entrepreneur, jurist, spy!  It's a fascinating period of history about which most of us know little, just after the fall of Rome and in the beginning of that shadowy 'dark ages' period. 

New year approaches

In what can only be called a groundswell of popular opinion, there is a universal call that I should blog more in 2012.  I am happy to announce that it is a new year resolution that this will happen!

A no less important resolution is to attempt to be more adventurous in trying different foods.  Consequently I have resolved to try a different vegetable, or some other different food, each week in 2012.  Better to try a new vegetable than encounter them in the street (as in Day of the Triffids...see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids) is Mycroft's view.