One day in French class at school, I was given a sentence to translate that entirely baffled me. Unlike one of my Latin teachers, who would choose translators pseudo-randomly, which allowed him the freedom to give me the thorniest sentence in the piece (which he typically did, the bastard), the French teacher would simply ...
To Beverly Hills, early yesterday morning, in my informal capacity of IT-guy to my Famous Philosopher Friend. He’d called me a couple of days before to say that he was having problems with a new printer he’d just got, and now neither printer nor computer (an Apple G4 Cube) was working properly. It’s not ...
Jumpsuit G. Oversells’s hero is the great Richard Simmons — he’d at least love to be as butch as Richard — but for the moment his domain is middle-of-the-night infomercials, in which he impresses the Botox off of his co-host, Cindy Ex-Actress, while working up a sweat to KC and the Sunshine Band. He’s a ...
Via Gloria Brame, who gives good blog, this bit of silliness from (of all things) The Sun, reheated by Ananova. It’s probably nonsense, but it has a small whiff of plausibility about it. Are You Being Served isn’t remembered all that fondly in Britain – it was dated long before it ended, and operated on ...
I’ve been having fun watching the videos from the 2004 ACLU Membership Conference, which are available here. The Gala Dinner, ‘America at a Crossroads’, in particular has some great stuff. After Sandra Tsing Loh [Sweet Chariot] and John Sayles, Seymour Hersh wanders on and, in his low-key, self-effacing ...
There’s a short scene towards the end of Star Wars which, despite being shot carelessly, as if it were just tedious but necessary exposition, is hugely important to the film. Luke, Han, Leia and the droids have just escaped from the Death Star with its plans, and have done the hyperspace thing back to the ...
I found lots of good crunchy fibre in this piece by Tom Coates, What you should know before starting a doctorate. Having given up a PhD myself too, I empathised with a lot of the feelings of conflict, depression, failure, burning-out. I can’t speak too much for the argument that doctoral students consider their path ...
Walking westwards down Wilshire from our new apartment towards the commercial centre of Santa Monica, a funny but almost magical thing happens. The street that pumps like a main artery through the centre of LA seems to vanish into a blue haze in the distance. It’s the Pacific Ocean, of course, but it comes as ...
If it has to be endured, the least one should expect from spam is that it be entertaining. I’m kinda tickled by the recent rush of spam appearing to come from people with names apparently dragged from some random generator, yet which capture something. It’s probably just me seeing pattern where there is none, ...
About our new dishwasher… A couple of years ago I taught a course called ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence Programming’ — largely because I was available when no-one else was. It turned out to be great fun, and not least because I’d been through the same course one year as a student, and ...