When I was growing up reading stuff like Enid Blyton's 'Famous Five' stories, I was intrigued by references to things like the children eating ices, or taking rugs with them when they went camping. This was in the early 1970s, when there was no way to easily find out what this meant; to me in Canada, ice was - well…

It - and other fine British words like bollocks, wanker, and gobsmacked - are probably better known Stateside now than they were in 1993, thanks to British TV shows, and movies like Trainspotting. Also, I was never a regular watcher of Buffy, but I remember that Giles used some British words that almost certainly…

I'm Canadian and my husband is English, and our son was born in, and grew up in, Canada. We joke that he's fluent in English and Canadian; he'd say things like 'Here come the binnies to collect the rubbish' on garbage day when he was little, and in kindergarten would ask to go to the loo, and refer to garbage cans as…

I remember that there was a fuss in Britain about renaming the movie Free Willy before it opened there, since 'willy' is British slang for 'penis', and there were fears that it might be off-putting for some. The filmmakers declined to change the title, which was possibly a mistake; apparently when the trailer was…

Oh, the huge manatee. . . .

Speaking of The Onion, whatever happened to the framed front pages that they used to sell? I was looking to get another one for my son, who already has two of the covers ("Man Walks on Fucking Moon' and 'JFK Shot') and is looking to get more stuff for the walls of his first apartment, but they don't appear to do them…

There weren’t too many explicitly canonical references in tonight’s episode, ‘The
Lying Detective’, based on the story ‘The Dying Detective’ (1913). And can I say how great Una Stubbs is as Mrs. Hudson?

As a journalist - albeit a minor one for an obscure small-town weekly newspaper in the interior of British Columbia - I say thank you, Meryl, for your support of what journalists do, day in and day out: hold people accountable, stand up for those without voices, and point a finger at what is wrong. Opinions are not…

I've never brought myself to watch this, although I did see the original stage production in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby in fall 1987, I was involved in getting a Sherlock Holmes society - the Stormy Petrels of British Columbia - formed at the time, and going to see the play was the first thing we did as a group.…

I'm not sure, but we can have elderberry wine with it if you like. We make it ourselves.

As a Sherlockian I love the number of Sherlock Holmes adaptations and variations that are around; they're not always to my particular taste, but if it pulls more people into reading the original stories (which anecdotal evidence suggests is the case), then I'm fine with them all.

Thank you!

You should watch 'An Engineer's Guide to Cats', which is hilarious. It's presented by professional engineers named Paul and TJ, and Paul's deadpan delivery makes it even funnier. 'If you have one cat, you're just a guy who has a cat. If you have two cats, well, the two cats are friends, so they can keep each other…

Me too (both watching it six times and laughing at 'Arms of the Angel'). I love how by the end he's just basically throwing in random phrases and singing about beer.

Horror is usually my go-to reply, but there's no (or very little) gore; more like classic English ghost stories but with a bit more depth in terms of psychology and characterisation. That is, I want to scare you, but that's not the only point.

It's called Northwest Passages, published by Prime Books in 2009 (my name is Barbara Roden).

I think Alice Munro has put up with that a lot as well. Maybe people have stopped asking her, now that she's won the Nobel Prize. On the other hand, she probably now gets comments along the line of 'Well, you would've won it sooner if you'd written novels.'

I laughed out loud at '2016 models are compatible with windows.' And that presenter is wonderful.

Yes, there's no room to waste in a short story; you really have to get in there, establish the characters, and get on with it.

Liked for comment/user name synergy.