Free at last, FOGgies (pt 5), and a new look

Free at last

I am now the pleasantly confused owner of an Android device. This could mean a change in modus operandi, but after a 20-years' exposure to the dreaded 'Windows' virus I am perforce more at home in that environment; indeed, there are times  when a sort of Stockholm Syndrome starts to take over and I find myself wishing for the Bad Old Days.  Possibly I will in due course be blogging away happily on my new tabletty thing, but first things first; I must learn to walk before I run [off at the mouth?]

FOGgies round-up

I have mixed feelings about the FOGgies – recognition of distinguished contributions to the corpus of bad writing. Apart from the seasonal misfire [well it made sense at the time, but a correspondent soon put me right see the Update], there were four posts. The first gave two awards:

Most Meaningless String of Abstract Nouns 

Best Epithet Given Inappropriate Subject Status

The second gave only one, going to town rather on the award for

Most Misleading Use of Headlines

The third gave another two awards, for

Most Unnecessary Use of Management Jargon

and a

special 'Clusterbomb' award for a family of inter-related euphemisms

The fourth gave one:

The FOGgy for Hasty Sub-editing (or 'Can they really have meant to write that?)  

There would have been more, but as I  said in that last post (which sounds appropriately final, in a bugle-y sort of way)  'Waves of apathy for the FOGgies – reflected in the Blogger statistics – have persuaded me ... to put an end to the FOGgies'.

They may be back next year, but with more planning.

The New Look

<digression theme="Man proposes, Blogger disposes">
This was my planned text:

Attentive readers may have noticed that hitherto each Harmless Drudgery post has had a footer that points to my TESconnect resources and Amazon links, and that the statistics given in this footer are time-specific. I update them from time to time, but some of the older posts have footers that are well past their sell-by date. 

From now on, the 'footer' information will be on a separate page.

But things aren't working as I expected them to, and I have things to do before the end of the year. So you'll have to make do with the same old same old.
</digression>

A happy New Year to  all our readers (a growing number, averaging about 35 visits a day). Here's an interesting graph, showing  fairly steady, if not meteoric growth (as I said recently, meteors fall anyway). I'm not sure what happened in the year to September, but otherwise the trend is in the right direction.

b

PS – A few clues to be going on with:

Confused stab in the dark – not for them! (4)
Whinge and throw fish back with space for grasping motto. (5, 4)
Marooned sailor finds shell (7)

Andrupdoid  2015-01-01-17:20  – just to prove I can, and to fix a typo.

Update 2015.02.12.15:05  – Added PPS

PPS  – A few clues to be going on with: And the answers:

bats

carpe diem

abalone [the first fruit of my -AL- work]

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Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.