too much pink

Posted on August 15, 2002 by andrewb

does this to a brain. Or maybe the pink is what happens to the brain when you watch seven hours of television a day for a fortnight.

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apocalypse soon

Posted on August 14, 2002 by andrewb

The word count of the exhausted beast.

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found poetry

Posted on August 11, 2002 by andrewb

“In ced-3 mutants, the undead sister of the rectal epithelial cell usurps its sister’s position and performs its functions.”

From the Cold Spring Harbor monograph C. Elegans II, 1222 fun-filled pages of cutting-edge helminthology.

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hidden dangers

Posted on August 10, 2002 by andrewb

It happened with nuclear power: why not Feng Shui: a mighty force for peace perverted to warlike ends. If this craze spreads, it will provide us with an inexhaustible fountain of excuses. “Why did I sign that deal? His lawyer must have been wearing lime green underwear.”

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Fiddling

Posted on August 10, 2002 by andrewb

Topstyle is the insomniac’s friend. Do you like the redesign? Write on only one side of the paper. Lie if you must.

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expertise

Posted on August 9, 2002 by andrewb
There are three stages of journalistic understanding.
  1. You don’t understand the subject, but are full of infectious enthusiasm. That’s when you write the “Cure for cancer” stories
  2. You could pass an exam in the subject, and it shows.
  3. You could pass an exam in the subject, but no normal reader would suspect.
It takes a long time to reach the third stage, but it’s the only one that counts unless you can stay forever ignorant, and not all journalists can manage that.
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by the right, fall out!

Posted on August 9, 2002 by andrewb

An interesting split is developing in the British right-wing press. The Times and the Telegraph are in favour of war, of course. The Telegraph is being thoroughly consistent. It will always argue for the world to be run by a benevolent American empire. The Times has no such larger policy but it is in favour of this particular war. The rest of the Murdoch press just likes all wars, if Our Lads are involved in them. But the Mail, on Wednesday, had a full-length leader coming out against the war.

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Smart nice people

Posted on August 7, 2002 by andrewb

Acting dumb and nasty: Nick Denton (moreover, First Tuesday, yes, that Nick Denton) argues that we should invade Iraq to crush Arab millennial dreams.

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The Athens of the West

Posted on August 5, 2002 by andrewb

One of the most absurd of all present day pundits is Victor Davis Hanson, whose theory that there is such a thing as a Western Way of War, which descends from Pericles to Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, isn’t quite completely bullshit. Here’s why:

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parasangs

Posted on August 3, 2002 by andrewb

to march still: the journey to the end of the worm extends like Xenophon’s anabasis. But today I reached the place where the first maps run out, and the end should have been. Onwards.

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