2024-12-22

Ouch. Morning.

Neil Gaiman sez: I’m home, and a bit exhausted. It was a beautiful day, and I took enormous pleasure in wandering around the garden in my dressing gown this morning while not being interviewed. Oh, how I love not being interviewed. I could spend several happy lifetimes not being interviewed, and between the not-interviews I […]

Indeed.

Quotation of the Day for June 4, 2007 “It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking.” – X. Marcel Boulestin, cook and writer (1878-1943)

Woe and sandwiches

Quotation of the Day for April 25, 2007: “I now know why my own childhood packed lunches were such joyless, dispirited affairs. It was vengeance. And despair. Somehow it is very hard to feel inspired to make sandwiches at 8.15 in the morning. I just stare into the fridge. “As Nietzsche said, peer long enough […]

Meetings

QOTD for March 12: “When he was younger Mr Phillips had hated meetings. Or at least he had once he had got over the grown-up feeling, the warm glow of inclusion, of being invited to his first meeting with his first employers, Grimshaw’s. Children and students didn’t have meetings; only adults, serious employed people had […]

Penance

Quotation of the Day for January 5, 2007: “I’ve been waist-deep in a dead hippopotamus, and I’d rather do that than change diapers.” – Eric Humphries, production manager at Skulls Unlimited International, on getting used to his line of work. The company claims to be the world’s leading supplier of bones, both human and animal, […]

Green

Elizabeth May, current leader of the Green Party of Canada, is running in the London North Centre by-election today in an attempt to be the first Green Party parliamentarian in Canada. In her honour, here’s a bit of Flanders and Swann: Misalliance The fragrant Honeysuckle spirals clockwise to the sun and many other creepers do […]

Again with the bacon

Pitchfork interviews Tom Waits Pitchfork: Do you have a favorite sound Tom Waits: Bacon. In a frying pan. If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for […]

Slow day for the government

The new(ish) federal government is certainly keeping my media scan calm and uninteresting with its endless list of ribbon-cutting announcements: Canada Revenue Agency: The Honourable Gerald Keddy, Member of Parliament for South Shore-St. Margaret’s, Announces the Signing of a Contribution Agreement With a Nova Scotia Charity Yawn. But sometimes some levity makes its way past […]

Sucks

(QOTD for August 15) “Sucks is the most concise, emphatic way we have to say something is no good. As a one-syllable intransitive verb, it offers superb economy. Granted, some things require more involved assessments (like, say, James Joyce: I find his early work unparalleled in its style and its evocation of emotion, while his […]

Mysteries of the universe

And another QOTD: The real world is a complicated place. In order to provide illustrations in a physics lesson that emphasize only a single concept, such as Newton’s Second Law of Motion or the principle of Conservation of Energy, over the decades physics teachers have developed an arsenal of overly stylized scenarios involving projectile motion, […]