long ago and far away

Drove through the streets of Gainesville with my father, who talked about a book he is writing about Brazil. He said when he was in Brasilia...

shape and strength

Eliot said it was the poet's job to purify the language of the tribe. Philosophy has sometimes shared that ambition. The bidding systems...

never trust a widget

Level of education required to read PP: TAR ART RAT: According to critics rant

I know I know I know

The "blog which is an art project which is disguised as a blog" and which has, literally, changed names a couple hundred times bu...

I type QWERTY you type QWERTZ let's call the whole thing off

SMB said in a recent comment that if I were to have a shopping basket on the website it should definitely be in Flash. (SMB disapproves of s...

inscrutable occidentals

Was watching Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More again for a piece I'm writing for The Believer on sequels. The DVDs have inte...

One we made earlier

I got an e-mail from Rafe Donahue a couple of months ago with two plots that I couldn't get to display properly, and so time passed, tim...

Word from Q

I asked Hassan whether it was really necessary to have a shopping basket in Flash and he said Yes. He explained: What I have in mind is some...

SGTD

I got an e-mail a few days ago from Mithridates . He said if Tender Only to One was what he thought it was it should go public because it mi...

Imran sent off

"I am not a dictator, I want a democracy," he told Britain's Sky News. "The day when there is no turmoil in Pakistan, I w...

impossible negative

From Good Math, Bad Math The British lottery put out a "scratch-off" game called "Cool Cash". The idea of it is that it...

Edy Poppy

While in Morocco I got an e-mail from Rose Merrill, an American who does I forget what in Berlin, announcing the book launch of Edy Poppy. ...

Our Man in Port Moresby

IG is about to head off for Papua New Guinea, having been made AAP correspondent in Port Moresby.

the new new grub street

Gabriele Bärtels, award-winning journalist, founder and editor of the now defunct online magazine Frida, had a remarkable piece in last week...

Camfed

Readers of The Last Samurai may remember that I spoke in the acknowledgements of my friend Ann Cotton, who had started raising funds in 199...

paperwork

It's 6.50 am. I got up at 6.02 to put more coal in the ovens before they went out. It's tricky because you have to leave the flu ope...

Scott Adams reveals some

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, agreed to take part in a Q&A session on Freakonomics . On blogging: It’s the best creative outlet I’ve...

more on schmoozing

DSL said he was sure schmoozing meant simply social talk rather than sycophancy; I said I had always thought of it as social with talk with ...