It’s nearly Christmas, isn’t it? The time to find solace and warmth in exotic and historically expensive spices: ginger, bark of cinnamon, mace, coriander and cumin. Coupled with warm ovens and tricks of kitchen chemistry, we can bake plenty of goodies to give mouthfeel satisfaction. The other day I observed something strange about some boys. […]
Tired of those boring old ecumenically-correct “holiday” wishes, those “season’s greetings” that don’t convey what you really believe? Dean Landsman has the perfect may-your-wishes-come-true holiday greeting for the rest of us — and no, it’s not just any old Festivus greeting, either. It’s a good’un: take a look and see what I mean… Edit: I […]
My blog writing for today consists of a comment I wrote in response to Tim Aldrich, who found my Running out of time (Nov.8/05) entry. Tim Aldrich is the editor of About Time; Speed, Society, People and the Environment, and he was kind enough to leave a comment on my blog. And I wrote a […]
I just confirmed through trial and error that I cannot receive any mail sent to my yheibel AT post DOT harvard DOT edu address if it has files attached. This presumably also applies to people who have “signatures” that include files (a picture, a business card, whatever), although I particularly suspect Word files as being […]
Just a quick pointer tonight to Harold Pinter’s acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize in literature. Pinter starts by telling us a story about what’s true and what’s false for the writer (of fiction), and then modulates into a scathing indictment of what is true and false in politics. Political power, Pinter writes, is […]
Americans haven’t always been so blasé about war profiteering. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said: “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.” FDR’s strong feelings about war profiteering were shared by his successor, Harry Truman. As a Senator, Truman had traveled […]
Some projects I’d like to write: • why the paintings of Takao Tanabe remind me of Gustave Courbet’s • why Mowry Baden is a derivative sculptor whose work is internally incoherent • why early 20th century so-called “heritage” residential Victoria “architecture” should, for the most part, be torched to the ground so that nothing of […]
My neighbourhood association’s website links to Victoria Earthquake Maps, a handy compendium of information for the seismically worried. The Composite Relative Earthquake Hazard map is fascinating: I learned that my home sits on ground rated “low” on the hazard scale. I’m in quadrant 47,500 and 536,300 — that little loopy street that looks like a […]
Looking at my referer log yesterday, I experienced my personal equivalent of getting slash-dotted: Daryl Cobranchi, who writes a homeschooling blog, linked to my cocktail-party-piece, and I was inundated by hits from his site. They continued today — and after reading around in his blog, I can believe that he has a large and loyal […]