Monthly Archives: September 2004

Praying to scorpions

Martin Kozloff is a Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington; amongst other things, he teaches a course in Classroom management for the mildly handicapped. How would he teach, I wonder, a student who got up … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in War | 3 Comments

Crime and error

Somone — Tony Howard, I think — wrote the other day that he had never understood Talleyrand’s saying that something was “worse than a crime: it was a mistake.” I think the difference is this. A crime is something for … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

Deux doigts

élevés à la presse de l’université d’Oxford, se trouvent ici. A fine companion site to the German-English dictionary that lives in my sidebar. Continue reading

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A whole other question

Steve Bell’s cartoon on Tuesday showed Tony Blair singing a version of “my Way” which rose to the final line “I gave Bush Myyyyyy ass.” This raised an important question of principle. Why not “arse?”. Tony Blair is a British … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Travel notes | 1 Comment

The benefits of faith

It is a favourite trope of Dawkins-type atheists to claim that faith is unjustified belief, and thus by definition a bad thing, which could not possibly have arisen by natural selection, except as a sort of metastasis of trust in … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in God | 3 Comments

A work of genius

Last night I finally watched Aki Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys go America, for which I had paid $40, with shipping on Ebay. You can’t get it on DVD at all, and the video is out of print. Never was $40 better … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Travel notes | 1 Comment

A work of imagination

This link is a complete, short, Project Gutenberg reprint of a booklet of half a dozen Victorian hand shadow postures. You see the hand in the foregrounds, and the animal in the background. That’s it. You don’t see the shadow … Continue reading Continue reading

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Ancient prophet

“I‘m sure there are plenty of great young songwriters working out there now and yes, I really hate them”. From a rather wonderful talk by Loudon Wainwright. Jim White went to interview him once for the Independent, in Leeds, or … Continue reading Continue reading

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A note on policy

Boring abusive comments will be disemvowelled. Persistent offenders may be banned. Continue reading

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If you have time

Prepare to waste it here. It looks as if the new DNB database has been left open for a little while. I recently wrote a wormseye about the absurd pricing of the OED. It turns out that the new DNB Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Literature | 2 Comments