In Thinking About The God Delusion, John Scalzi ruminates on Richard Dawkins’s new book, which I haven’t read yet, so can’t really comment on. However, I do know enough of Dawkins’s writings that something Scalzi said, mostly in passing, leapt out at me. He said this: As far as things go, I suspect ...
[Originally written as a reply to a (long-gone) blog post, this sort of works on its own.] I think it’s generally a mistake to approach the concept of someone being disciplinarian for someone else assuming it’s really complex or subtle, especially if it’s men we’re talking about here. Since when did ...
To Costco last weekend, where I was a taken a bit aback by this message prominently displayed on the side of a large case of Coke: 36-pack 50% more than 24-pack It has the parsimony and the profundity of haiku: its simplicity, one imagines, can’t be anything other than the skin atop a porridge of ...
He felt like one of the pedestrians in a Grand Theft Auto game. Not San Andreas, because then he could imagine moving to a small shack in the woods away from it all. No, he was stuck in Vice City, his existence in the sordid metropolis bounded by cruel fences and vast, unbroken, uncrossable ocean, ...
Lindsay Beyerstein on World Cup penalties: At that level, most of the kicks are going to go into the net. Someone ought to tell the England team that. With respect to replays, I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that they’re anti-climactic. In England, the FA Cup Final went to a replay in the case ...
Is it better to be able to see a long way down the road a bus will be coming from, since that means you’ll get to see it soonest, even though you might have a long wait for it to subsequently actually arrive once you’ve seen it, and even though if you can’t see the ...
After years of bristling with annoyance at any suggestion that my very vaguely Anglican upbringing might be much of an influence on what I do or don’t believe — one flavour of which might be to imply atheism as a negative reaction to something imposed, rather than a ground-up positivist construction of something new ...
Another chapter in the pointless quasi-scientific investigation of intercessory prayer ends, the believers retreating to regroup and rethink, but never to let the results of their own studies actually affect what they think, except to confirm what they already believe according to that most anti-scientific throwback of ...
In the middle of their usual chaos and surrealism, I’m always a bit floored and intrigued by two things about my dreams: how occasionally a bit of really solid, structured narrative comes through — which reminds me of the fact that William Rose claimed that the entire plot of The Ladykillers came to him in ...
Here’s a great marketing wheeze, clearly conjured up by advertising types who Don’t Have To Do It Themselves. Erect a small estate of perspex cubes, perhaps ten or so of them, each perhaps seven or eight feet in each dimension, along the pedestrianised shopping drag at 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. ...