Home and Dry

• Kate Feld
• 23 Feb 07, 03:07 PM

It’s that low, slow time of the year just before spring begins in earnest. Rainy city bloggers have wisely been staying dry and cosy indoors this week.

Academic and blogger Timothy W. Stanley has been visiting Manchester Art Gallery: “There are a few pieces there which have haunted me since first seeing them, and so I haunt them back. Manfred on the Jungfrau by Ford Madox Brown is one such piece.” The painting, based on a Byron poem, features a figure teetering atop a snowy cliff.

“What drove him to the brink?” Timothy wonders. “As Manchester Art Gallery's note card on this painting puts it, ‘Manfred's inner turmoil springs from over-education. His quest for knowledge leads to confusion and he summons up spirits through black magic.’ Could it be that this man, Manfred, was a kind of extreme example of the terrors of writing a doctoral dissertation?”

Inveterate couch potato Why Did I Go Wrong? (Slogan: Watching TV so you don’t have to) took a short break from parsing Britney Spears’ insane behaviour to mourn the passing of an important man:

“It is with profound regret that we report the death, at 93, of Robert Adler, the co-inventor of the TV remote. Millions of people would have loved the opportunity of asking him (a) what are some of those buttons for? And (b) where is it? We could have sworn we left on the sofa…. Viewers wishing to pay their respects may press the mute button for a minute’s silence.”

Poetry blogger StraightTalkingStreet... has a new poem up, bravely titled “Salford Women.” It begins:

The women dress like little girls
and the girls dress like little women
and the little girls dress like their
mam's dressed twenty years ago.
But that's fashion on the dole.

Any Salford women out there care to respond to these sartorial observations?

And our friend at Manchester International, The Airport Diaries, has bravely ventured onto hitherto unexplored ground:

“I took a trip to the other side. While walking down the concourse I came to the realisation that I have never entered the duty free shop. I see it every day, its glare burning my eyes, its empty, plastic promises slicking my brain. Well, I ventured into that place, preparing for the worst…”

But what shocking truth did he find there? Oh, you’ll just have to go read it.