End of a decade – part 2

[For people inclined to argue we aren’t about to enter a new decade, please see part one.  Thank you.]
On a personal level, this past decade hasn’t been that great.  At the start of it, I was well-supplied with older relatives – I had one great-grandparent, one grandparent, and both parents.  At the close of it, [...]

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent

Reviewing a biography of Beaumarchais, David A Bell, dean of the humanities faculty at Johns Hopkins University, has the following to say:

Beaumarchais was a manic character, of the sort who would now be diagnosed at a young age with Attention Deficit Disorder or something similar, and placed on medication designed to ensure a long [...]

Old Mr Buffett sat on a tuffet…

I was watching TV on Monday night, and I heard a man say, about Wall Street bankers and financiers, something like this (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

This idea that the class of people who move money around are somehow special, and deserve special treatment – well, it’s getting pretty far away from where we should be, [...]

‘Pitchers’ & ‘Catchers’: Thinking about gay sex

(Note: this post contains rude words, and talks about people’s naughty bits, and the things that they like to do with them.  If you’re accessing this somewhere where such things might be frowned upon, then you might want to go and look at this entirely-safe-for-work picture of kittens instead…)
There’s a rather cute assumption amongst some [...]

The right to die

This is a re-posting of a comment I left a little while ago over at Mental Nurse.  The post I was commenting on was discussing the sad case of Kerrie Wooltorton, a woman who had made use of a so-called ‘living will’ to ask doctors not to save her life following a suicide attempt.

People search for the darndest things

So, this is an entirely pointless post, and is basically just a method of time-filling for me, and space-filling for the blog.  Anyway, what I’m going to do is look at a few of the search terms people have used to find my blog over the past week, and write about them.  Yes it’s that [...]

Why do little girls like pink?

I have to be honest, I had never heard of the Science: So what? So everything campaign until representatives from it were invited by the BBC to provide model answers to the ‘difficult questions’ that children ask their parents.  Most of the answers the representatives from the campaign give are quite good, although one or [...]

Twitter: On the one hand ‘meh’, on the other ‘yay!’

This is a post I started a while ago, and then scratched away at half-heartedly for a bit, and then gave up on.  I’ve been inspired to come back to it and finish it by this post on a recent blog discovery, Kapitano.  (Well, I say ‘discovery’, but given that he commented here, it’s not [...]

A tale of two signs

The area of the city I live in is the part of town where immigrants have typically come to rest.  There is evidence of successive waves of immigration all around, in the form of places of worship, shop names, and so on, and this ability to read the social history of the area is one [...]

America, I love you. But…

…there are things about you I will never understand.
I mean it when I say that I love you, America.  I love you because you are, more than any other country, the embodiment of Enlightenment values, because things like equality and justice and liberty are among the values that you honour most highly.  (And never mind [...]