One of the things I didn’t like about Blogger was that there was no support for including “spoilers” in your content. So when I wanted to include content in a post which might be a potential spoiler for some people, I set the foreground colour to be the same as the background colour. The reader would have to select the text to see it.

One of the joys of having my own WordPress environment is that I can install my own plugins. In this case I have installed “wp-spoiler-alert”.

So imagine that this sentence contains a spoiler. You can’t see it now, but you will be able to if you click on it.

Pretty cool, huh?

Kate Winslet has too much talent for one person.

She can do drama. She can do comedy. She has won Oscars, Golden Globes, and BAFTAs.

And then I discovered that she can sing!

I don’t know how many times I have listened to this song over the last few weeks. Too many to count certainly.

Enjoy Kate Winslet singing “What If” from the movie “Christmas Carol: The Movie”:

I mentioned in my old blog that:

• Trevanian (Rod Whitaker) is my favourite author
• Shibumi is my favourite book
• Whitaker’s daughter, Alexandra, collaborated with him on some of his later books
• She is going to complete his unfinished work, Street of the Four Winds

I took the liberty of writing to Alexandra back in January to see how things were progressing with her own book and SOTFW. She was kind enough to reply as follows:

“it’s all coming along. Thanks for your encouragement.”

So we can look forward to a “big canvas, large-cast, Nineteenth Century novel” (his words) from Rod and Alexandra.

You can read more about the book here (you can even read the first chapter)

I am a lover of all things Japanese (with the possible exception of the food!)

I have been a fan of ninja since:

• Eric Van Lustbader wrote “The Ninja” in 1980
• The “Enter the Ninja” movie in 1981
• The “American Ninja” movie in 1985

Note: “The Ninja” is a good novel. The two movies I mentioned here were not very good at the time and certainly have not stood the test of time!

The word ninja commonly featured in my passwords for many years (I can say that now because it is no longer the case).

My love of ninja has survived many, many things which I have not enjoyed. Examples would be movies ranging from “Ninja Assassin” to “3 Ninja Kids”!

So when I saw that the Ninja TLD was being released, I just knew that I had to get one. And hence “mccullagh.ninja”. So in spite of my lack of martial arts training, there is now a “peter.mccullagh.ninja”!

BTW: In writing this post, I discovered that a movie called “irish American Ninja” was released in 2005. It has an IMDB rating of 6.1 which is not bad for a ninja movie (the 2009 “Ninja” movie with Scott Adkins only has a score of 5.5!). Still, the mind boggles!