A Very Moral Tale

Fellow Christians, Now that Sister DeWitt has gone amongst the cloven-hoofed Mohammedan horde, to convert their numbers by main force shoul...

Coming soon to paperpools...

harrumph. Hello, hello? Is anyone there? *posts blog entry, checks if it's there, goes back to edit it* Haha, this is so cool! I'm a...

off radar

In Morocco using a keyboard that deletes everything i type as fast as i type it; staying at the hotel foucauld; have asked a few loyal reade...

Your Job in Germany

directed by Frank Capra and written by Theodor Geisel ("Dr Seuss") [HT Ken McCracken, sayanythingblog.com ] Meanwhile a certain An...

uplift

I saw a peculiar film last week. The story: A group of boys attend a New England prep school. Their English teacher uses poetry to teach the...

Old Worthless

Lawrence Aller: After school, on the dreary afternoon of November 22, 1928, I went down to the Seattle Public Library to seek some forbidden...

Mind the GAAP

Tim Annett has a post on MarketBeat , the WSJ's blog, on a practice that gives new meaning to the term 'creative accounting': Je...

Just the one

Christopher Caldwell has a review of Philip Cook's Paying the Tab in the Financial Times: As laws against smoking and drugs become more ...

Let's! Go! Fly a Kite!

Took a break from carrying 100 kilos of coal up from the cellar: read the Weekend FT. Chris Giles and Peter Thal Larsen have an extraordinar...

You say Pace and I say Pace

Language Hat asked readers this morning how they pronounced the preposition 'pace' ('-- PAY-see or PAH-che -- and has already h...

Emoticons & the Vienna Circle

25th anniversary of the first emoticon. Language Log : On September 19, 1982 at 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posted this electronic message to ...

Another Country

Getting ready for winter. Clearing the apartment. In winter Berliners with Kohlheizung -- coal-burning ovens -- wear 5 layers of clothes i...

search engines and such

On Language Log, Barbara Partee comments on a counter-intuitive set of Google search results: Google peculiarities: When I tried to get a ro...

NYT website free for all

The NY Times will stop charging for parts of its website starting at midnight tonight (Tuesday) -- good news for those who have tracked a li...

whatever happened to the war on tea?

Heartened to learn of signs of success in the war on drugs in Afghanistan (Afghanistan has cornered 93% of the world opium supply), Matthew ...

sarko bleu!

Sarkoland, sarkostique, sarkoshow, sarkofrance, sarkoblog, sarkospam, sarkophobie, sarkocirque, sarkonazi, sarkononmerci, sarkorama... just ...

language, truth and logic

On Language Log , Mark Logan writes in with this contribution to a post on scalar implicature: Your post on the Zits comic reminded me of an...

Hopeful Monster

"I wrote a strong letter to Harold," says Mosley. "I said—look, this really makes it all so awful. She's lying unconsciou...

the new new Constitution

Ronald Dworkin, in the NYRB, 'The Supreme Court Phalanx': chilling piece on the voting patterns and legal reasoning offered for deci...

Impossible worlds

This time last year I tried out an Arabic puzzle on Mithridates -- a puzzle I was thinking of using in Your Name Here. I wrote a couple of ...

[upsilon with circumflex for Mith]

τοῦτον

The silence of the velar fricatives

Jean Véronis has a post on Technologies du Langage on the difficulties facing the deaf, with reference to a programme on France Culture on ...

Murakami, Danto on Rorty

Self Divider has another installment of his translation of the Murakami interview in Korean GQ. Also a post on the latest issue of Bookforu...

Affektenlehre

A wonderful post by Mark Liberman of Language Log on the circle of fifths, the system of temperament and the association between certain mu...

and one and two and

Got this e-mail from Rafe Donahue, a biostatistician at the University of Vanderbilt: Ok, so one day I was looking at heart rate data. You ...

Zoonekynd on Murrell on R Graphics

I was going through Zoonekynd's Statistics With R yesterday and came across a clock plot for website statistics. It was the work of a m...

Freeware French

Came across a website, Imagiers , with extensive resources for learning French online. It's for PC only, so I haven't been able to ...

ad hoc

I had an ear infection last year. I passed a building with a sign stating that an ear, nose and throat specialist had a practice within. I w...

All the best writers write at 3.21 am

Unaccustomed to public speaking, Mithridates rashly offers to speak at an academic conference, Having no idea that conference papers general...

New Arabic Grammar

I've been glancing through Haywood and Nahmad's New Arabic Grammar. This really is a very useful book: it includes passages at the b...

Fiction gap

Language Log has a post on a piece by Eric Weiner in the New York Times, Why Women Read More Than Men , which cites an experiment conducted ...

Qur'an widget

Amazing Qur'an Widget displays the complete Holy Qur'an on your screen. Windows only (but the new new Macs run Windows...). Here .

Red Light on Craigslist

The New York Times has a piece on the use of Craigslist to facilitate prostitution, with recent stings by law enforcement officers to catch...

No Can Do

Tried to see some photos of Cate Blanchett as Dylan on TARARTRAT . Disaster. (Not that I use Safari much, but Firefox freezes me out of this...

Suntory Reserve

Mithridates has unearthed an amazing YouTube clip of a series of whisky commercials starring Kurosawa Akira and Francis Ford Coppola. I coul...

The Matlock Standard

Came across Clayton Littlejohn's blog, Think Tonk , which has the best byline ever (sorry, TAR ART RAT): In like an or. Out like an and....