I’m away for the weekend: there’ll be no posting. In the meantime, more gossip and thought wittering.
- A story about the Dean of an Oxbridge college, who found his organist was having an affair with his chaplain. This upset him. The Chaplain’s wife was pretty unhappy, too. So he went to the college and said “It’s him or me”. The college thought for a while, and decided that the truly important thing about having a chapel was that the organ playing should be up to scratch. The Dean went.
- Is there any real difference between the modern Chinese attitude to IP and the Elizabethan English attitude to Spanish treasure? State-sponsored piracy is not a new invention.
- A coward dies a thousand deaths, they say, but modern science has changed all that. With our increased life expectancies, anyone even slightly prone to panic attacks can expect a head-on collision with approaching death twenty or thirty thousand times before the real thing.