Yesterday the latest issue of Private Eye tumbled through the letterbox, and was brought to me (I am laid up following an operation involving cutting into my second toes and inserting pins!) by the wonderful wife. There’s a symmetry here, because the subscription to Private Eye is a gift from my mother-in-law. There’s two things... Continue Reading →
First the humblebrag - I am, in my opinion, the only person in the world to have letters published in The London Review of Books, The Financial Times, Viz and Private Eye. Second, the annotated and hyperlinked version of the letter in Private Eye. (For those who don't live in the UK, Private Eye is... Continue Reading →
What do we expect of ourselves? What do we expect of others? Do we understand and give proper weight to the ways that 'institutions' (norms, habits, rules, rituals) shape what we see and what we think is 'right'? This all comes from a shockingly stupid piece of commentary fifteen minutes or so ago on "Test... Continue Reading →
Short posts till I am feeling a bit better (to be clear, not feeling bad, just fairly immobile and with mild discomfort that was challenging my pharmacological Calvinism). First thing I'd point to is a couple of piece by an excellent writer/thinker called Jessica Wildfire. There's her 'urgent normality syndrome' thing, but some other worth-reading... Continue Reading →
Greetings. On my voice recorder there is an untranscribed apologia for no-diary-yesterday, in which I explained that I lolled around finishing off Stanley Johnson's The Commissioner (tl:dr - nice start, a few amusing observations of Brussels and the functioning of the European Union, but enough thrills to be a thriller. Nice stuff on industrial espionage,... Continue Reading →
Look at this graph. The red line is the North Atlantic surface sea temperatures for this year, All the other lines below it every other line that we have data for. And you look at that line. And if you have any imagination at all, you know what it spells. And you keep thinking to... Continue Reading →
Apologies to my thousand of readers who hang on my every word. Yesterday, I got lost in feeding moorhens. And I could and should have done my doom diary then, but I didn't have anything to say (when has that ever stopped me before??). And then I spent a long time moving piles of books... Continue Reading →
So, The conversation, (full disclosure, I have written for it) has got a couple of excellent articles you should read. One is a summary of air and sea temperatures, and what it all means. It doesn't talk about the Atlantic sea ice issue. But you've got 1000 words, you can't talk about everything. The second... Continue Reading →
Doom diary, day nine much delayed because I was too busy having much fun in the face of the apocalypse. Namely one of my best (only) friends, who was best man at my wedding, came up and we listened to and watched a lot of cricket - the first Ashes test more of that later. ... Continue Reading →
The past, as well as being another country, is a slippery, slippery thing. And there's overlap with words like “history,” “custom and tradition (see Hobwbawm and Ranger’s 1977 edited volume The invention of Tradition.) Where am I going with this? There was an interesting comment on my last blog post about where and when entrenched... Continue Reading →
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