Category Archives: Blather

I woke up with an ear infection that made me feel as if my brain were floating in a viscous bath inside my head, so that any sudden movement would set it rocking. There are pills that cure this, but … Continue reading → Continue reading →

So I was reading Mills on music, and the examples he gave of sublimity were Mozart and Weber’s Oberon. Right, then, off to eMusic to see what Weber sounds like. The first discovery is that Emusic has been “improved” for … Continue reading → Continue reading →

My mother’s Mac mini died on Thursday. The hard disk went. It was about fifteen months old and had seen very light usage indeed. So I took it into the Apple centre i Cambridge, where they sucked their teeth and … Continue reading → Continue reading →

We need a word for what happens if it all goes wrong. The optimists have got the singularity. I propose that we take back the multiplicity, to suggest both the variety of possible or likely disasters, and the fragmentation of … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Amazon’s search inside the book feature does not expose all pages, though I don’t understand the basis on which some, but not others are hidden. In any case, you are likely, when browsing, to get a dialogue box that says … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I get the Swedish domestic news every day from Svenska Dagbladet. The wire service reports are sometimes memorably short. Here is an example: An unusual prosecution has been brought in the district court in Borås. A former intern at the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The girlfriend of someone I know very slightly recently had a late abortion for purely social reasons: in plain English because neither she nor the father are people anyone would trust as parents. Actually, I don’t know her, but I … Continue reading → Continue reading →

One of the canapé fashions in London this year is post-modern fish and chips: a few long thin potato fries arranged around a goujon of cod, and perhaps a couple of whitebait, in a cone of newspaper about the size … Continue reading → Continue reading →

some football game which was, at least according to Sky News, the most important story of the evening except for the scheduled riot afterwards,which seems to have been postponed by jealous Germans. In general, I was obviously hoping that England … Continue reading → Continue reading →

OK — so I travel to the European Patent Office in Munich to do a day’s unpaid consultancy. They put me up for two nights in a nice hotel, and I get to meet some interesting people. It seems a … Continue reading → Continue reading →