Do you actually want this?

I can’t find it now to link to, I’m afraid, but I was reading an ‘Oh, brave new world’ style article on techy matters somewhere, and it raised this as a plausible scenario likely to develop in the next couple of years.  I was slightly surprised to realise, as I read, that the author of [...]

Two recommendations

Yes, I’m still alive.  Whoo-hoo/ Ah crap*
[* - delete as applicable]
I have encountered two things on the web that I thought might interest you.

Sod the victims, let’s defend the abusers

I am really bothered by this discussion over on Mental Nurse.  To summarise, a number of patients are setting out an appalling catalogue of abuse at the hands of the mental health system, principally in the UK, but also in Ireland and elsewhere.  This is truly horrifying stuff – up to and including rape, in [...]

(Crystal) ball gazing

In light of the recent Queen’s-speech-related twitchings of the corpse of our present government, I’ve been inspired to write a post about the forthcoming general election, and politics in general.  No, wait, come back!
Ok, so the first thing to say to those few of you who are persisting with reading this is that the Conservatives [...]

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 [...]

Not a good time to be a gay American

On Monday, residents in the state of Maine were voting on a referendum motion to overturn a law that had extended marriage rights to same-sex couples.  The motion carried – I haven’t been able to find the full results, but to be fair, I didn’t look very hard once I discovered that the ‘No on [...]

If they can’t get you coming, they’ll get you going

I’ve been doing some reading about personality disorders, and I came across the contribution of one Harry Guntrip to definitions of the schizoid personality type.  There are nine alleged characteristics of this personality type which Guntrip pulled out of his arse described, one of which is withdrawnness:

Did you know this about the postal strike?

Because I didn’t.
In all the talk about the postal strikes, we’ve been hearing a lot that the Royal Mail is dying.  No-one sends letters anymore, we’re told, they use email instead.  It’s a persuasive argument, because it seems intuitively correct – I send quite a few emails, and I almost never write a letter.  But [...]

How low can you stoop?

As you may have heard, Jan Moir, a columnist for the Daily Mail, wrote a vile, hate-filled column ladling serves-him-right spite all over the (at the time) unburied coffin of Stephen Gately.  I was going to do a take-down of the column itself, but many, many people have beaten me to the punch, so there [...]

41 semi-sentences

Well, I haven’t done a meme for a while, so I thought I’d give it a go.  Eroswings (from whose blog, Eros Den, I’ve stolen this idea) answers this much better than me, so be sure to go and check it out.  The basic idea of this meme is that there is a sequence of [...]