Justina Robson: Living Next Door To The God Of Love Metropolis is a city of superheroes where you can become anyone you like – fight all day, party all night…Sankhara is a universe where everything is remade by night, according to the inhabitants’ deepest, darkest dreams…Koker Ai exists in another time and space, where Intana, less favoured courtesan in the… Read more →
Author: Mr. McLaren
Quick and Amusing
Best headline ever. Somewhere there is Fletch wannabe laughing at the headline he slipped past his editor. (I wonder if gnomes run to the underwater sanctuary to avoid this kind of violence.) * You know how sometimes when you’re writing up your Articles of Piracy you wish you had access to some really snazzy buccaneering fonts–just to make it look… Read more →
Hanging Around The House: More Downstairs
So, last time it was the couple of things in my office. (Remember that the thumbnails in these posts are links to gigantic versions.) Now, we’ll move out of my my office into the hall outside: My office is off this hall on the right, the guest bedroom is off to the left. In the shot you can see my… Read more →
Can you say “Hack”?
So, they are making Talking Jesus, Mary and Moses dolls. I may have to buy a couple of these and join in the long and proud tradition of hacking talking toys. (I admit, it was the Lord of Evil who put this idea into my head.) Can you imagine how sweet it would be to have Jesus ask “Have you… Read more →
8 months already…
Wow. I can’t believe Sarah is already 8 months old. She’s definitely mobile now, and is on the verge of becoming an efficient crawler. She’s talking (in a special language that seems to be mostly made up of “ba”, “ga”, and “da”–which is fine with me because it includes “dada” a lot) and she totally sings. She is also the… Read more →
Yup, that matches my experience
Writers left to their own devices, as we have already seen, will drive around aimlessly until they are spontaneously afflicted with drunkenness. Read more →
Hanging Around The House: My Office
A while back pal Gwenda tried to convince people to do photo-tours of their homes. I tried to shoot some pictures for something like that, but I found that I couldn’t take pictures that showed things the way I want to show them. However, it did inspire me to do a series showing the various pieces of artwork, etc., that… Read more →
I didn’t forget about the wine tasting
However, I am such a slacker that it’s taken me a month to get around to writing the followup to the initial post about the wine tasting I lead for Trish’s co-workers. In the initial post we talked about the whites that were in the tasting, and now I’ll talk a bit about the reds. So, as I mentioned last… Read more →
A couple of quick book links
If I convinced you to check out Stephan Zielinski‘s book Bad Magic with my review, or if you came to the book yourself by some other route, you will probably be interested in the interview with him that just popped up at the Agony Column (in both MP3 and That Vile Format). If you haven’t read the book the interview… Read more →
A few links on language and lexicons
Sometimes things seem to pop up in nice thematic clusters. For instance, I saw an interesting article on Cajun English at PBS (link via Brad Parker) that I found very interesting. Despite being subjected to abuse and stigmatization for many years, Cajun English speakers abound. Why would this be? Why would a dialect which was considered a mark of ignorance… Read more →
Hump Of Hate: Church & State
What could possibly be worse than the alignment of highly conservative political factions with fundamentalist Christianity? Xemu knows the answer to that question. As an aside, also from my Hump of Hate, even ignoring who this award was given to, doesn’t this sentence from the article encapsulate so much that is hate-worthy about North American society? Members of the group… Read more →
Nick Anderson, Pulitzer Prize Winer
The 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning was awarded to Nick Anderson “for his unusual graphic style that produced extraordinarily thoughtful and powerful messages.” You can see portfolio sample at The Washington Post Writers Group. Read more →
Hump Of Hate: Texas Textbooks
So, I’ve talked a lot about textbooks, primarily about the religously-motivated alterations of their content; most recently it was the homophobic alterations of Texas texts. Now I read in a post at Ambiguous.org that because a number of Southern states buy their texts as a bloc, lead by Texas, that the national publishers are self-censoring their content so that it… Read more →
Hump of Hate: Fascism Anyone?
A while back, Laurence Britt published an article in Free Inquiry magazine entitled “Fascism Anyone?”. In the article Britt looked at a number of fascist regimes (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia) and finds fourteen common characteristics of all of them. The “14 characteristics of fascism” from the article have spread… Read more →
U.S. Currency wonkery
Nouriel Roubini of the Stern School of Business at NYU, and Brad Setser at University College, Oxford, have co-authored a paper on the possible unraveling of the Bretton Woods 2 system, and the consequent hard landing scenario for US currency. A PDF copy of the report is online, and makes interesting reading, if you think currency issues are interesting. Both… Read more →
