Yearly Archives: 2002

Remember googlewhacking?

Sex in vegetables works. Actually, I was wondering where fruitless plants have their seeds: once they’ve been pollinated, where do the seeds appear? I still don’t know. Continue reading

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The new new cuisine

I came on this fragment of a transcript when I was working this morning. AC is Alan Coulson, at the Sanger Centre, who probably knows more about the extraction of DNA than any man alive. “John” is Sir John Sulston. … Continue reading Continue reading

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homonyms

When it says on my resume that I used to be the chief reporter for the Spectator, it doesn’t mean this one. Heteronym isn’t the right word, either, though it’s groping in the right direction. Continue reading

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a needed word

We have hyperbole. But what about the complement of the process, in which a word gradually loses all its force as a result of constant overuse? Awesome, brilliant, classic, original …. all these suffer from hypobole. Continue reading

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awesome

I love that word: it’s the Californian for “brilliant” and suffers from equal Hypobole. If Fred Sanger were to offer the right change in the market in Saffron Walden, he’d be told he was “Brilliant”; walking through a drugstore parking … Continue reading Continue reading

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a woman who works for her money

has written with alarming grace about it here. Continue reading

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I could have been shot

or at least badly reviewed, for collapsing in hysterical laughter in my seat on a subway train when I read this in the New Yorker. Continue reading

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lunch at wired

where what was once achingly hip now just looks inconvenient. It’s housed in a converted warehouse tucked under a feeeway on 3rd street, abou a half mile walk from the subway. Up at the top is cool clean chic: MOMA, Continue reading Continue reading

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Paulina

lives in a sunstruck bungalow that consists almost entirely of books, though there are a few walls scattered around for verisimilitude. At her desk is a monitor, a small dot-matrix printer, and a big flying saucer Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, same … Continue reading Continue reading

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money

Six weeks ago I lost the charger for a motorola mobile phone. I know exactly where it is: plugged into a wall at the hotel Zlatorog in Bohinj. What puzzles me is that I can get a replacement phone for … Continue reading Continue reading

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