This week I am suffering from some academic jealousy. First, we found out last week that Trish has been accepted into the highly competitive management PhD program at SMU. While I can’t imagine being interested in the subjects she’s studying, I am a little jealous of her going back to school. Not that I would actually give up any of… Read more →
Author: Mr. McLaren
Minor sidebar work
I’ve added random quote functionality to the sidebar, and so far I’ve just fed in something like 30 choice Bertrand Russell quotes. I haven’t decided yet whether or not I intend to add other authors, or just keep deepening the Russell quote collection. You’ll see it at the top of the sidebar. You will also see a new entry in… Read more →
My little brother is insane…
…and I’m a bit jealous. Steve has essentially been on the DL for all of this season. Due to the wonders of hockey contracts he still gets paid while he recovers–even though he isn’t playing, so this fact hasn’t pinched his lifestyle too much. He just played his first game of the season, and in what I can only assume… Read more →
No Pants != Nude
I just want to say that while I work from home, I have never worked in the nude. 10% of telecommuters are nude – Wikinews A survey by SonicWALL, a Sunnyvale, CA, based company, reports that 10% of worldwide telecommuters are nude while working, finding 12% for men and 7% for women, respectively. A gender gap also exists for showering… Read more →
Margo Lanagan’s Voice
I was really expecting a more pronounced Australian accent. That’s what I get for working with guys in Victoria, I guess. A while back genius Australian short story writer Margo Lanagan posted that she had done an interview with the BBC World Service‘s program “The Word“. The short interview is nominally about her brilliant short story collection Black Juice–a collection… Read more →
Festival Of Me
So, when you hit your first birthday you’re starting your second year of life, right? And when you hit you second birthday you’re starting your secondthird year of life? Well, that means that when you hit your 99th birthday, you’re starting your 100th year of life. (I can actually prove this via mathematical induction, if you doubt me.) Which means… Read more →
Guinness Ice Cream
Paul once made a Guinness ice cream dish for me, where he reduced Guinness down to a super-powerful thick sauce that was poured over fine french vanilla. It was tasty, but apparently took a lot of effort. I wonder if this would be nearly as good–I think an experiment is in order. Maybe on the 17th. (From the January 18th,… Read more →
Unrelated Lapham Quotes
“Talk about the flag or drugs or crime (never about race or class or justice) and follow the yellow brick road to the wonderful land of consensus. In place of honest argument among consenting adults the politicians substitute a lullaby for frightened children: the pretense that conflict doesn’t really exist, that we have achieved the blessed state in which we… Read more →
The Case for Impeachment
Have I mentioned my deep and abiding love for the essays of Lewis H. Lapham? They were (and sometimes are, now that he’s “editor emeritus”) the first thing I read in Harper’s every month, and I’ve bought a linear foot or two of books of his writings because of them. He’s more than a bit pretentious in style at times,… Read more →
This whole ports thing…
While I’m Bush-bashing, I should toss out at least some small comment on the whole ports thing. Look, I actually don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with the ports deal–I think most of the reaction to it has been ridiculously overblown. In fact, I think Kenton Kelly has some excellent points in his piece over at Reason Online: Beyond that,… Read more →
Implosions Make Me Happy
In my Firefox bookmarks, I have a “To Blog” folder, where I store links I want to come back to later and say something about. Inside that folder, there are some additional subfolders that break things down into rough categories. The most populous of these folders is the “Hate Bush” folder, with well over 125 bookmarks in it. I mention… Read more →
Personal Space Limits
How can you not want to read an article that includes this: Bin Laden was “very polite and humble and shy. He didn’t like too many kisses… he didn’t mind being hugged but kisses he didn’t like and he just seemed to float… across the floor,” and this “I never really thought I’d be a Muslim,” he told ABC. “I’d… Read more →
HGPA February Invitational
Friday night was this month’s HGPA tournament. To make a long story short, I had a great time over the course of nine and a half hours, and made it into the money. We had two tables worth of people initially, and once elimination play got us down to one table a lively cash game appeared to break out in… Read more →
The right way to start a Sunday
Sleep in a bit. Get up, pull on some comfy clothes. Go to the kitchen. Grab some fresh chives, and “dice” them into very small bits (this is actually more easily done with kitchen shears than with a knife). Take two black truffles, each about the size of the first segment of my thumb, and dice them up into very… Read more →
In Praise Of Idleness
So, one of the things I told myself I would do in 2006 is spend a lot more time writing about Bertrand Russell [wikipedia], or rather about his works, on this blog. Russell, you may recall, is one of my biggest heroes, to the extent that there are multiple images of him around the house. Writing about Russell is going… Read more →
