Sitting in a deli the other day, having lunch, I was battling with the thixotropic brattiness of a new bottle of Heinz ketchup. I’d shaken it vigorously, and was whacking the bottom, to little effect. A girl from a couple of tables away leaned across and gave some advice. Tap on the ’57’ with the ...
This timely, pertinent, and wholly depressing little piece from LA Weekly about Dick Cheney’s outburst. Hooray for the Guardian, and not for the first time. This Victorian veil that’s drawn over certain good solid words in popular media drives me slightly nuts. It’s even more baffling in this case, since ...
In another life, I’m running a short story contest, and keep being reminded of a linguistic wrinkle that’s most naturally associated with naive arts reviews. The simplest form would go something like this: ‘This was a great story. I really enjoyed it.’ On the surface, there seems to be nothing ...
Okay, so today’s the day for dangerously-obsessional language-issue blogging. Get those safety helmets firmly on, tighten the chinstraps, and we’ll proceed. Sitting in The Pantry yesterday, as a bit of a breather from the last day of our Big Move to Santa Monica, I was having their yummy sausage, fried potatoes, ...
(Because what the world really needs most of all right now is another Fahrenheit 9/11 review.) To Santa Monica last night, for a (sold out) midnight screening of Fahrenheit 9/11, and I came out slightly disappointed. The edge provided by being in a cinema surrounded by a mostly-young, mostly-very-hip, ...
There’s finally more from the Jim Wightman story, and it’s more of the bizarre same. Wightman responds to a new piece in New Scientist, which says, inter alia: While analysing the transcripts of their conversations, both Webb and Pryke noticed similarities with a program, called Alice, that is free to download ...
Last summer, on the last night of a month-long stay in London, A. & I wandered down to the flagship Waterstones, in Piccadilly — which claims to be the biggest bookshop in Europe. The occasion was the midnight launch of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I had no idea how many people ...
Once upon a time, DejaNews spectacularly fucked up their monopoly of Usenet archiving with some boneheaded ideas about how to turn what they had into cash. Turning words in Usenet postings into commercial hyperlinks was a PR disaster; they simply didn’t comprehend how many people would object to it on the grounds that ...
So I’m up too late watching Prime Minister’s Question Time on C-SPAN, and I find myself missing the oddest things about British politics. And wondering, in an up-too-late sort of way, if anyone has looked at the effect of the architecture of political debating chambers on debating styles and the democratic ...
Somewhere in the US there’s a bright, articulate, worldly kid who can succeed where Michael Newdow failed. It’s frustrating that, after such a long process, the US Supreme Court should throw his case out on what amounts to a technicality. I am so far away from being a lawyer that I’m coming back in the ...