Things I Learned Today #1: “blackmail” is a Scottish word, and the Highland Scots invented the protection rackets. World Wide Words: Blackmail The mail in blackmail (at various times also spelled maill, male and in other ways) is an old Scots word for rent. This was usually paid in what was often called white money, silver coins. It comes from… Read more →
Category: Linkapalooza
Today’s Only Content
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present for your edification, a highly-trained Canadian actor who has spent 30 years working in Britain (on stage and screen, and in over 200 BBC radio plays, among other things) playing the part of a stage actor from Tennessee in the 1960s, who is in turn playing the part of a British narrator in Victorian times,… Read more →
Monday Miscellany
It’s really a miscellany today. I was half-tempted to title this 88 lines about 44 links, and maybe even do it in some kind of poetic structure, but fortunately a combination of laziness and good sense prevailed. Nice to see that former local (and HGPA-member) Brian O’Malley‘s movie deal is actually happening–at least leads are being cast and a start… Read more →
A throne is a throne…
You know, the Pope-throne in the Vatican press room, or wherever it is, reminds me of something… (photo source) Oh yeah, I know what it is. It reminds me of the stage at the No Rest For The Wicked concert I saw in Milan. (As an aside, I know I shouldn’t be shocked at hypocrisy here, but doesn’t seeing that… Read more →
Something to chew on
Oh, I am going to enjoy reading a bunch more stuff at Bostrom’s site, I can tell already: Wisdom is distinct from cleverness or mental efficiency. Wisdom is about getting the big things right. A prerequisite is the ability to recognize what the big things are, i.e., a sense for proportion, for what is important. I am often thinking about… Read more →
Attach Us! We Are Hot Japanese Men!
I am not making this up. Things I don’t understand: Japanese popular culture The very idea of “cell phone charms” Things I do understand: Drunkenness Drunkenness coming in stages These things come together in the “drunken salaryman” charms, which I recently read about at Inventorspot. The stages of being dunk [sic] according to these little plastic dudes are: The Lecturing… Read more →
An inscription in the sand
In any event, the point is that unforeseeable circumstances that call into question an existing understanding of life, function to progress and move humanity forward. They prevent the rigidity of custom and tradition by forcing outdated modes of thought to be discarded in favour of those that more accurately represent the times. In this way, those moments of critical insight… Read more →
Portraiture and Literature
Got a little time to spend crawling around on the web? Allow me to recommend that you use some of it to check out the archives at Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s clobberin’ time!!! You might ask “what the hell is that”? Well, in the site’s own words: This website, now in its ninth incarnation since being launched in 06.1998, is… Read more →
Once more unto the breach
…to close a bunch of tabs before Firefox memory issues eat my computer. Let us begin with my praise of BibliOdyssey. They pulled me in earlier this month with the scans from an antique geomancy almanac, and I’ve been exploring their archives since then. Wow, is there a lot of stuff in there for a bibliophile to gawk at. Cosmological… Read more →
Linkblogging in a storm
Might as well linkblog–can’t dance. I don’t know whether to be amused or disheartened about the whole “25% of Brits think Winston Churchill is fictional” thing. On the one hand, it’s pretty funny. On the other hand, what does it say about the education system that this result is even possible. On still a third hand, it’s not like North… Read more →
For Fans of The Wire (and the morbidly curious)
I was fascinated to learn that the real Baltimore Sun has an interactive page/Google Maps application that shows the location of murders, and allows you to filter by age, race, gender, cause of death, and whether or not there was an article about the murder. (It also allows you to filter by district which is helpful for fans of The… Read more →
OK, You have to admit, that’s pretty damn funny
Jerry O’Connell’s message Read more →
A Sunday Miscellany
Well, I’ve had a very busy weekend here in Melbourne–which I may get around to writing up at some point later tonight–and now I’ve made it back to my hotel/apartment, and it seems like a good time for me to do a little bit of value-added linkblogging. So, no theme, just lots of things that I found interesting: First up,… Read more →
Quote Of The Day
“People who have to apply rules like them because they eliminate the need to exercise judgment.” –Ernie The Attorney He goes on to suggest that some people don’t want to have to defend a judgment, but I suspect there are a really large number of people who are too lazy to get that far: they just don’t want to have… Read more →
Even More Things I Did Not Know
Science has brought us a permanent, but easily-removable, tattooing ink. Does this change the metatext of tattooing? I mean, the pain is still there, but if the permanence isn’t part of the subtext anymore, what does that mean for the story? Is it to obvious to predict the rise of a serial-tattooing culture, or a rift between the permanents and… Read more →
