Ein echter deutscher Schlüsseldienst

I got locked out of the apartment again. 2C2E. I went to the Schlüsseldienst in Hagelbergerstraße, who knows me well by now. Ähm, ich bin au...

Back Street Bankers

Great piece in the FT by Amy Kaslin on black market money traders getting hard currency into Burma here

Junk Drawer Math Problems

from drunkenpanda (HT TAR ART RAT )

Being Ilya Gridneff

It's just under 4 years since I met Ilya Gridneff in an East End pub by Victoria Park. The pub was aggressively organic; two large black...

Stardust Memories

Adam Mars-Jones used to write like this One gets the sense that Neil Gaiman's rep as a genius must somehow be a reflection on the subcul...

I wish I'd written

-Alors quoi, merde, dit Zazie, on va le boire, cette verre? Gabriel s'extrait avec habileté et souplesse du tac. Tout le monde se retrou...

Pythonia rule the waves

Complétons notre première formule : un système d'organisation bureaucratique est un système d'organisation incapable de se corriger ...

a cork on the sea of language

Bremer Sprachblog has this quotation from an interview of Urs Widmer, a Swiss scholar and writer: Unser Sprachgebrauch ist durchsetzt mit...

¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿Qué???????????!!!!!!!

An extract from J M Coetzee's new book, Diary of a Bad Year, appeared in the NYRB for 10 July. The Seven Samurai is a film in complete ...

Titanic

Panel of barcharts using the Lattice package in R, showing survivors/non-survivors of Titanic, divided by class (crew, 1st class, 2nd class,...

Murakami interviews

Self-Divider has translated two interviews of Haruki Murakami from GQ Korea here and here .

r

amusing comment on colour manager > ## Truly awful colour scheme to illustrate flexibility > plot(e, colors=meta.colors(summary="...

Rule, Pythonia

Eric Allison writes in Monday's Guardian A prisoner released early from jail with no money was handed an IOU for £140 but no information...

The Fourth, Unethical, Path to Ad Fixations

Jakob Nielsen on banner blindness I've been reluctant to discuss one of the findings from our eyetracking research because the conclusi...

Not the New Yorker (link fixed)

Mithridates has pointed out that the link in the sidebar to Samizdat doesn't work, because .com got left out after helendewitt. It now...

Bris à la Ingmar Bergman

8 soap commercials by Ingmar Bergman, undertaken during a Swedish film strike in the early 50s

Bris á la Ingmar Bergman (II)

Bris á la Bergman (III)

Bris á la Bergman (V)

Bris á la Bergman (IV)

Bris á la Bergman (VI)

Bris á la Bergman (VII)

Bris á la Bergman (VIII)

the paper pools

Hockney had a friend who lived in the country. The friend kept telling him, You have to come, I'm doing amazing things with paper pulp, ...

Camfed

Chris McGreal has a piece in the Observer on Zimbabwe: The shelves are bare except for what Zimbabwe's limping factories produce - bake...

Philip K. Dick

A friend has send me a link to an article in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik on Philip K. Dick; he comments: It really captures both what I l...

war is hell

The frenetic nature of the conflict in southern Afghanistan is underlined by the fact that many young infantrymen intend to leave the army b...

brief note

I should perhaps say, as an addendum to an earlier post on copy-editing problems, that The Last Samurai might well never have been published...

Why I Miss Philosophy

Does anyone know of any literature on the closure problem for testimony: that if one gains knowledge that p from someone's assertion tha...

Cormac McCarthy & the semi-colon

Mithridates has sent me the link to Cormac McCarthy's interview with Oprah Winfrey, here -- you have to join Oprah's book club, bu...

Street charity

There was a post about a week ago on Freakonomics on economics of street charity , in which five panelists were invited to comment on this q...

Jaegerman's graphics

Edward Tufte has a collection of news graphics by Megan Jaegerman here

Activism

Nick Szabo on Unenumerated has 10 ways to make a political difference , starting with the most important: Vote with your feet. He also has s...

out and about

barthes/chancel

I haven't managed to find my tape of Jacques Chancel's 1975 interview of Roland Barthes for Radioscopie. I have an mp3 recording tha...

the child's guide to incentives

Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist has come. It may be that its superficial level of analysis was thought appropriate to a gen...

"I" was a teenage robot

All this puts us in the position of grasping schizophrenia as a break-down of the relationship between signifiers. For Lacan, the experience...

Vertigo

I met TAR ART RAT at Yorckschlößchen for a beer last night, and we did NOT talk about nothing but blogs, but in the course of the conversat...

bush telegraph

According to Sitemeter, the number of Mac users among Paperpools readers ranges between 20% and 38%. This means, of course, that the Paperp...

More Keegan

Christopher Duffy, who was lucky enough to spend some weeks teaching Yugoslav militia the elements of Napoleonic drill for a film enactment ...

Keegan, The Face of War

This gives some idea of the style of the book: [Military histories, we may infer, must in the last resort be about battle.] That certainly w...

out of the loop

TAR ART RAT asks WHY IS THIS BLOG BECOMING JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER CRAP CULTURE BLOG??? hmm, scheisse. What I want to know is, where are al...

Lest we forget

Remember that writers are creatives too Better Writing Through Design

Jewish Humour in Wikipedia

(from the DeWitt archives) > Jewish depictions of heaven as a place where humans go upon death are > few, and depict it as a place whe...

Trailer for Dr Strangelove

Here

samizdat

I've decided to sell a few stories on my website. I was looking again at a story that had this line: When I was at school my teachers us...

Dryden's Horace

Happy the man, and happy he alone He who can call today his own He who secure within can say Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today C...

RMAs

A reader writes I don't know if you've ever come across Sir John Keegan, but he wrote a remarkable book called "The Face of Bat...

Copyfarleft and Copyjustright

Challenges to traditional copyright resulting from peer-to-peer applications, free software, filesharing and appropriation art have caused a...

the little prince

The diffusion theory here comes from the German sociologist Simmel. This says that adoption runs like a pig through a python. The earliest...

So long, Jorge Luis Borges

Un plan brillante -- the Borgesian PR blog of Aleix Gabarra.

Jihad & secondhand books

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), under threat of a law suit, Cambridge University Press has just agr...

Riddley Walker poll

Results of poll: Masterpiece: 51. Good but not great: 2. Heard of not read: 7. Never heard of: 27. One last excerpt from the book for those ...