Robert Donat Lookalike?

A reader has sent me a link to the Daily Mail which reports on Arpan Shama, a 10-year-old resident of Edgbaston who speaks 11 languages, bu...

inbox zero

This morning I did not even bother to clock into Fogbugz because, I forget, anyway it suddenly occurred to me that I had not checked out the...

Fix If Time

Trying to sort out minor problems with the proofs for an excerpt of Your Name Here which is to appear in n+1, not to mention major problems ...

charmed, disarmed

I had an idea for a project which I would like to work on with Pons, whose dictionaries, quick tip sheets and other language-learning paraph...

best news in a long time

I wrote an e-mail to David the other day in which I commented that my mother, though trained as a pianist and an accomplished musician, seem...

Things go better with Coke

London wine writer Tim Atkin recalls watching four cigar-smoking east Europeans order two bottles of first-growth Bordeaux and one of Chatea...

Bookmarklets

Presse Citron had a post on 18 most useful bookmarklets, most of which were new to me. One was from Zamzar : ConvertIt enables you to click...

Creatures of a day

I read artist diaries and autobiographies as fast as I can get my hands on them. I read the obituaries online (in newspapers on several cont...

Another Rubber Tree

Trying to eliminate chaos from apartment, picking up where I left off on going to Morocco. On the narrowly-caught plane back I read a review...

goodbye to all that?

German law forbids the discounting of books except when damaged or in other special circumstances - a book must be sold at the same price wh...

so capitalist it's Marxist

Jonathan Jones on Frieze The Frieze Art Fair is the best advert for capitalism I've ever seen. Compared with almost anything you'll...

If that isn't aura it'll have to do

Robert Smithson said a great artist can create art by casting a glance. He raged at the materialism of the art world which gave legitimacy o...

busman's holiday

Many thanks to the contributors who have posted on PP while the auteur was in Morocco. If I move to Morocco for the winter I shall know PP i...

Josh.

Note on the Text: I was telling this story the other night and someone suggested that I really need to write it down, that it is just too w...

Imbecility and the Absolute

The autumn harvest of my verbal vegetable garden seems to have been decimated by some mysterious sort of pestilence - which is to say, my ha...

the fawlty code

I had a rather nasty hotel in Fez for which I had paid two nights. People were bothering me. I decided to leave a day early. I packed my bag...

lots of fried ants, lots and lots of fried ants...

Mark Liberman has a post on Language Log on the Piraha and other Amazonian tribes who apparently manage quite happily without numbers and c...

can we / can't we integrate a bit? & "On Kastanien"

Pictured above: Kastanien in Question. "What's the use?" (and Kastanienallee has two L's actually)

someone talked to me at breakfast

I had gone innocently across the road to buy Le Monde as soon as the newsagent opened (just 10 dirhams, or 1.10 euros) and went into breakfa...

Bad guesses

Ok, so in the early 1990's I am living in Olathe, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. My oldest son was a then just a baby so I was spend...

the bug in Excel

In Meknes, just checking emails to see if Justin Smith has set up an appointment with my dentist to fix my broken tooth on my return to Berl...