Plagiarism, deadly weapons, unexpected slippages

A few months ago, I visited the Oxford Museum of Natural History. It was really cool, a mixture of dinosaur bones, stuffed animals and exhibits about extinct creatures.

These were the kind of creatures who would never have inhabited the earth together and the museum was a really stunning, open building - but small. Also, the real bones were mixed in with replicas of what the bones would have looked like.

Having the kind of mind that I do, I thought how it would make a really good short story about all these different creatures coming to life - exactly as they were displayed - and only the ones which had once been part of a living creature doing it. So there would be incomplete dinosaurs running around along with stuffed tigers and the like.

I built this up in my mind, imagining two students getting a bit tiddly and visiting the museum just before closing then stowing away in one of the offices when it got locked up. Then everything comes back to life and they try to hide and run etc before realising that actually, a heap of bones isn't very threatening.

They make it out and are arrested by police, who discover that the museum is wrecked. On closer examination of the CCTV, however, they see there was definitely something odd going on...


Anyway, that was as far as I got with my story. Until, yesterday, I saw a trailer for Night at the Museum which is apparently based on almost exactly the same premise.

How annoying. I bet mine would have been better. It definitely wouldn't have had Ben Stiller in it, anyway.


I had two fairly bizarre experiences yesterday - firstly, I was walking along a road in the centre of town when a man came round the corner carrying a large, unprotected axe.
The man was wearing a lumberjack shirt and sunglasses (in December) and looked a bit weathered.

He obviously saw me looking at his huge weapon and said: "Don't worry pet, I'm not dangerous," and went on his merry way.


Then, in the supermarket, a woman fell over on something which had been spilled on the floor. A group gathered round her, discussing what had happened. One woman frowned and said: "It looks like an egg."
Well, I found it funny, anyway.