As the children get older it is highly efficient to buy smart presents for oneself but make a play of bestowing them on the progeny. Such as, for example, the remarkable ‘graphic novel’ Logicomix: Rush off and buy it with your remaining Christmas money. Now. It is the long, wry, subtle […]
In our family the period immediately before Christmas Day is taken up with the annual ritual of home-made Christmas cards. This tradition started when Crawf 1 appeared and has developed over the years as successive Crawfs have appeared and grown. Originally simple coloured drawings with some sort of family theme […]
Some readers of this site will know of the wonderful books of Misleading Cases written by A P Herbert, which cast a wry satirical eye on the application of legal principles to real life. See for example his impeccable reasoning in the legendary case of Fardell v Potts, which analyses […]
Is hosted by the raging Mr Eugenides. He kindly links to a couple of postings by the "ever-readable" me. But also have a look at a stirring defence of bullet points. And a Cheese-like look at the issues surrounding the outing of a blogger in Scotland. Plus home-schoolers are rising en […]
Goes to the Times website today: Bad, bad and very bad. Our critics’ butcher this year’s turkeys
As the myriad delgates wend their various snowy ways from the Copenhagen Global Warming Summit, what is the overall assessment? Not UN, but UM. Unambiguous Mess. Key aspects of the whole thing were a priori perverse from a Basic Diplomatic Technique point of view. Let’s audaciously and even hopefully assume that the science is […]
The Browser hosted an excellent first birthday party last night in London. The Browser is a good-looking attempt to set up a smart person’s online content aggregator organised in helpful but manageable categories – somewhere between the eclectic and leisurely Arts & Letters and the Economist. It is getting a […]
As feverish efforts intensify among global leaders to transfer money other than their own to and fro among each on an unfeasibly mammoth scale, back on earth some patterns are emerging. Which help explain why Greenland was not called, for example, Whiteland. What seems to be the case is that temperatures […]
Remember the FCO website’s prophetic announcement of an EU statement welcoming Free and Peaceful Elections in Honduras? That seems to have vanished. And we still have no official UK pronouncement via the site on this complicated issue with its many regional and other ramifications. So much for British Foreign Policy […]
Time is short. We can’t fret about the world and its awful problems 24/7/365. So, the question: how to allocate one’s moral energy? Some people campaign on the risks to small remote tribal communities threatened by a tidal wave of modernisation. Others demand reparations for real or asserted massive wrongs […]
