Yale University’s short-lived decision, in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, to ban realistic-looking but fake weapons from student plays was a classic case of overreaction.

Over the past century, Highland sports have found a niche in the United States, which now produces some of the top competitors in the world.

A science fiction and fantasy writer, Mr. Saberhagen was best known for his “Berserker” series about intelligent machines out to destroy the human race.

Eugene Carlson, 75, is accused of stabbing man who blocked his way in East Village section of Manhattan; allegedly used sword hidden inside his cane; unidentified victim is in critical condition

Peter Adams, British metal specialist, finds first Viking burial ground in Great Britain; site, located near Cumwhitton, England, dates to early 10th century and contains six Vikings and belongings that include jewelry, swords, fire-making materials and other equipment

Sword presented to Navy captain who participated in first battle between ironclad ships in Civil War is returned to Naval Academy, from which it was stolen almost 73 years ago; FBI recovers sword from collector who was not aware it was stolen; sword turns up during investigation into fraud accusations against three appraisers on television show Antiques Roadshow

Italian actor Franco Magni, who poses in gladiator attire for tourists at Colosseum in Italy, could face up to three years in jail for carrying sword

A Coney Island school teaches the arts of carnival sideshows, like sword-swallowing and lying on a bed of nails.

The stepson of a retired New York City police officer has been charged with his murder, the police said.

The sales of Asian art are about to begin in New York, with previews this weekend of Chinese, Japanese and Korean works at Sotheby's and Christie's.

IRVINE, Calif., June 29 (AP) A man wielding a samurai-style sword killed two people and injured three others at an Albertsons supermarket this morning before the police fatally shot him, the authorities said.

Man in Ridgewood, Queens, who was about to be taken to psychiatric facility by mental health counselors, grabs sword and holds police at bay for more than seven hours before being subdued

Article on Peter Landry, who teaches theatrical swordsmanship to actors and students at Williams School in New London, Conn; photos (Special Issue: Connecticut at Its Best)

Assad Ullah the nanotechnologist, a new look at the seafloor and predicting reef damage.

A British survey of 46 sword swallowers reveals that practitioners rarely seek medical attention, and that the most common problem they face is a sore throat.

That was fun! We've just finished watching Part Two courtesy of a Sky+ recording, and enjoyed it a lot.

The overall look is much improved from Hogfather, with better indoor sets and outdoor location work thanks to a bigger budget. David Jason and Sean Astin played very well off one another (even though Rincewind in the books is much younger, and Twoflower is Auriental, but making him Hammerkin is OK, I suppose: the cliché-tourist version of both is a great taker of snapshots.) Tim Curry showed his teeth a lot and Jeremy Irons made a great Patrician – unnamed, but obviously Vetinari, complete with Wuffles-as-a-puppy.

"What are we going to do with you, you little scamp?" immediately became a favourite soundbite...

...Unlike "wearing a wet copper armour and shouting all gods are--" (at which point the production had second thoughts about Rincewind's line.)

This one's a real niggle, because the word 'bastards' is in the book and it's what was shot; watch David Jason’s mouth. Even this mouth-movement was pixellated out during last week's trailers, but I didn't think the actual broadcast would be censored; I was mistaken. If post-production thought their redub to "idiots" wouldn't be noticed, they were mistaken. It's partly hidden by a sound-effect clatter of rock, which only points up how clumsy it is. Try this: since "bastards" turned out a no-no, then instead of bowdlerising it, drown the entire word with the rock-clatter. Beep it out with convenient local noises. Just as effective, and maybe even funny.

SFX is spotty and needs work to even it out from the highs of the view of Ankh-Morpork to the lows of green-screen horseback closeups (check how people rise in the saddle at a real gallop and bounce faster, guys!) - though I liked the dragons a lot, their appropriate upside-down roosting posture a well-thought-out idea. Action sequences could be a lot better, the swordfights in particular being clang-clish-clang knife-sharpening exercises (swashbuckling isn't what the Discworld is about, but still...)

Pacing overall is much improved on Hogfather, but still sporadically sluggish, especially in dialogue. Some exchanges that should be crisply delivered instead come out Slow And Portentous, (all right if the subject matter warrants it, otherwise not), and even though characters who dot their speech with needless Significant Pauses are mocked in the books, too many such pauses remain on the screen.

The fault here isn't the writing, though there were a number of places where I'd have trimmed hard. (I've done it before: 'deliver this in a leisurely way - if you can.') However the direction still lacks punch. I don't know whether Terry comments about this anywhere, but Vadim Jean remains too fond of admiring the view whether real or CGI, unwilling to cut an over-lengthy close-up, reluctant to alter a good line "taken straight from the book": maybe he's still a bit too respectful of the original material. Nothing wrong there, except that good prose dialogue doesn't invariably become effective screenplay dialogue.

In case you think I'm sticking the boot in, I'm not. Read the first paragraph again, then consider that my few subsequent paragraphs of criticism cover nearly four hours of TV time. The Colour of Magic is definitely fun, stuck much closer to the original material than any Hollywood suit could stomach, and I have a feeling that the next one (Going Postal, apparently) will be better yet.

Last night we watched the 1963 movie of From Russia with Love on ITV-4, I read the 1957 novel only a couple of weeks ago, and the conjunction produced a bit of wishful thinking. It would be great to see the novel's plot faithfully used for a period movie.

It would need a desaturated palette and a stark mid-Cold War look, including much use of grey, brutally massive Stalinist architecture during the initial Moscow scene-setting. There would be no gadgets except for those mentioned in the book: Bond's briefcase with its concealed daggers, ammo and gold coins, and a couple of bad-guy guns disguised respectively as a book and a telephone. Most of all, there'd be no mention of the fictional organisation SPECTRE. Bond's enemy would be SMERSH.

Which, according to Fleming, was a branch of MGB, the Ministry of State Security, though if you want to be unkind, this is another of those mistakes, since the real SMERSH went out of business in 1946, and MGB had become MVD then KGB in 1953-54 (having been Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD and a swarm of lettered sub-groups with varying responsibilities.) I can't blame him, though; keeping track of alphabet soup must get really dull for someone not writing history, and as for SMERSH...

How could any thriller-writer not fall in love with a department whose name (SMiERt SHpionam) means "Death to Spies"? – even though it's a remit close enough to that of the Double-O section that the Good and the Bad Guys would fit uneasily but appropriately in the same pigeon-hole.

Such a movie won't happen, of course. The Bond movie franchise just got a reboot into this century, and I can't imagine them wanting to go back 50 years into the last one. But it's an entertaining daydream. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks Vladimir Putin looks like a Bond villain. He certainly has the background for it.

You can take the man out of the KGB, but can you take the KGB out of the man? And would this man let you?

I've been re-reading Ian Fleming's James Bond novels – period pieces all, with a protagonist very different from the debonair gentleman spy of the movies. Sean Connery came closest in Dr No, when he told a villain that he knew the man's gun was empty – "That's a Smith & Wesson, and you've had your six" – then shot him. Twice. The second was a carefully-placed execution round, and though Bond’s double-O license to kill certainly includes execution of traitors and double agents (as in the beginning of the recent Casino Royale, though in my view the Dr No one seems more brutal), a shooting in cold blood, however justified, always has a nastier feel than any amount of action gunplay. M in Goldeneye described Bond as a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur," but the Bond of the books is even less appealing; he's a chain-smoking, alcoholic, xenophobic, culturally illiterate snob. Unusual material for a hero and cultural icon, but there you go.

Why Fleming? It's because I recently discovered an on-line version of his essay, How to Write a Thriller, and was curious to see how his rules applied to the finished product. The essay is too frequently edited, or copied from an edited source, but this one seems complete, and I saved it at once for inclusion in my computer folder "Tools of the Trade"– but, though it wouldn't be proper to edit the original, I couldn't keep from adding footnotes, thus becoming part of a long tradition. Kingsley Amis (in The James Bond Dossier, a thoroughly entertaining lit-crit of the novels) mentioned that even then (1965) catching Fleming out in mistakes was something of an amateur sport.

The notorious business of The Wrong Holster is one of the best-known. Geoffrey Boothroyd, a firearms expert (and, obviously, fan of the books) wrote to Fleming about improving what he saw as 007's rather inadequate guns. It was Boothroyd, later Tuckerized as "Major Boothroyd, the Armourer," who famously dismissed Bond’s .25 Beretta 418 as a "lady’s gun." It really is a pipsqueak weapon, though more than enough for execution and contact-range covert killing. He suggested that Bond be given a .38 Smith & Wesson Centennial Airweight, a snub-nosed revolver of the type associated with screen detectives and private eyes, and that it be carried in a "Lightning" Berns-Martin Triple Draw Holster. (Steve McQueen in Bullitt wears something very similar.)

Fleming fumbled the catch a bit. He equipped Bond with this holster all right (I think he liked the sound of its elaborate name) but instead of the revolver, put the iconic Walther PPK automatic in it. This pairing would never work: the holster is purpose-designed for a revolver, held in place by a curved spring around the cylinder. Automatics don't have cylinders, and the Walther is a distinctly flat example. Worse, when used as a shoulder-holster, the "Lightning" is worn upside-down. Result: the Walther would fall out every time. Oops. (Of course there are apologists who suggest that the Armourer meant a custom-built holster for the Walther. I suggest that Fleming got it wrong.)

Oddly enough, though Boothroyd did indeed recommend the Walther, it was as a weapon for the Bad Guys! I'm surprised Fleming didn’t take him up on it, because I can't think of any instance in the Bond novels when Germans or Germany are mentioned favourably; the people and the country are always seen as a threat to England (but not, apparently, to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.) Since this tic even spills over into Fleming's non-fiction work, Thrilling Cities, giving Bond a German gun seems out of character.

Amis gives very favourable mention to another commentary I'd like to read, though I've no idea how to get hold of a copy. The Gunnery of James Bond, by Bob Glass, appeared in "Snakes Alive," the journal of the Belfast Medical School (Trinity 1963), and though I went to Queen's University I had no association with the medical side. I'll track it down some day, because Glass's writing, according to Amis, is full of "energy and obvious enjoyment," and he corrects Fleming not through malice but because he's another enthusiastic fan."Few men" (writes Amis of Fleming) "could be so often wrong and yet seem so thoroughly, effortlessly, copiously, multifariously, triumphantly right."Sounds like Kingsley was a bit of a fan, too.

Diane and I still have several boxes of LPs in the attic, and sooner or later they're going to be burned to CD, transcribed as MP3s or whatever. About three years ago I even bought a turntable with a built-in amp and various direct-to-computer connections, but the fact that about 90% of the recordings remain untouched gives some indication of the lack of urgency. It's one of the "I'll do it when I get around to it" things that everyone means to deal with eventually.

The notion wandered through my head again last night, when I wanted to listen to a particular piece of period music while writing - Pox on You for a Fop (yes, really) performed by The City Waites, and I realised it was still packed away in one of the LP boxes.

Out of curiosity I trawled the Net for any reference to my old hi-fi stuff. That was when I discovered that I couldn't remember most of their names...! All the low-to-mid-range amplifiers and tuner-amps ("receivers", as they were sometimes called) are gone, so there's no jolt of memory. The first and cheapest was an Amstrad, I'm sure of that, but its successors have vanished beyond recall.

Turntables are easier, because some of them - such as Garrard and Rega Planar, both machines I owned - are still going strong. The final one, a Goldring-Lenco, seems to be a bit of a collector's item; mine spent about 20 years in my Mum's attic and has probably been dumped by now, along with my Wharfedale speakers. It's funny to think that the couple of hundred quid I paid in the mid 1970s for a very basic system translates into enough for something very high-end nowadays...

I remember seeing a Punch cartoon years ago, of a chap staring at an entire symphony orchestra in his friend's living-room, while the friend tells him "On the whole, it's cheaper than a really good hi-fi system."

You can still try for that joke. Start with a turntable, a tonearm, a cartridge, an amplifier, a system rack to put them on, some cables (you'll need more than just one pair); and a set of speakers. Oh, and a record cleaner. It's good to see we've advanced beyond those little anti-static squeezy guns. Correction. I spoke too soon. However, the last time I bought one of these it cost IRL£4.99. Even allowing for inflation and a lousy rate of exchange, Ouch...

I found all those items on just one website, and decided not to look any further. For one thing, I was starting to get an image of all this kit being bought by someone with a single armchair in just the right spot between the speakers, and a solitary test record. He then manages to scratch his record, goes stark raving Doctor Phibes looney bonkers and commits a series of interesting hi-fi-themed murders.

How long would it take to scratch someone to death with a gramophone needle at a constant 33.3 rpm?

Once again, Ouch...

I spent yesterday working, deliberately didn't look even once at the Net, and today Diane tells me that this happened:

George MacDonald Fraser's Times obituary.

George MacDonald Fraser's Telegraph obituary.

George MacDonald Fraser's The Independent obituary.

So there'll be no more Flashman, and his last book (correcting Neil Gaiman here, who thought it was The Light's On At Signpost) was only that wretched nonsense The Reavers. I don't take back one word of what I posted last October, so though I might read a Flashman novel later on, right now I'm going to pull down The Pyrates. That's how entertaining anachronistic romps should be done.

Rest easy, Mr Fraser. You've become part of the history you wrote about so well.