Holiday cheer

December 15, 2005

Tired of those boring old ecumenically-correct “holiday” wishes, those “season’s greetings” that don’t convey what you really believe? Dean Landsman has the perfect may-your-wishes-come-true holiday greeting for the rest of us — and no, it’s not just any old Festivus greeting, either. It’s a good’un: take a look and see what I mean… Edit: I […]

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Writing comments for entries

December 9, 2005

My blog writing for today consists of a comment I wrote in response to Tim Aldrich, who found my Running out of time (Nov.8/05) entry. Tim Aldrich is the editor of About Time; Speed, Society, People and the Environment, and he was kind enough to leave a comment on my blog. And I wrote a […]

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Sending files, nuking email

December 9, 2005

I just confirmed through trial and error that I cannot receive any mail sent to my yheibel AT post DOT harvard DOT edu address if it has files attached. This presumably also applies to people who have “signatures” that include files (a picture, a business card, whatever), although I particularly suspect Word files as being […]

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Harold Pinter on not-so-hidden history

December 7, 2005

Just a quick pointer tonight to Harold Pinter’s acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize in literature. Pinter starts by telling us a story about what’s true and what’s false for the writer (of fiction), and then modulates into a scathing indictment of what is true and false in politics. Political power, Pinter writes, is […]

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Where to now, modern caesars? (or: from republic to empire…)

December 5, 2005

Americans haven’t always been so blasé about war profiteering. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said: “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.” FDR’s strong feelings about war profiteering were shared by his successor, Harry Truman. As a Senator, Truman had traveled […]

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A string

December 3, 2005

Some projects I’d like to write: • why the paintings of Takao Tanabe remind me of Gustave Courbet’s • why Mowry Baden is a derivative sculptor whose work is internally incoherent • why early 20th century so-called “heritage” residential Victoria “architecture” should, for the most part, be torched to the ground so that nothing of […]

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On the possible benefits of staying home

December 3, 2005

My neighbourhood association’s website links to Victoria Earthquake Maps, a handy compendium of information for the seismically worried. The Composite Relative Earthquake Hazard map is fascinating: I learned that my home sits on ground rated “low” on the hazard scale. I’m in quadrant 47,500 and 536,300 — that little loopy street that looks like a […]

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On the stormy seas of schooling

November 29, 2005

Looking at my referer log yesterday, I experienced my personal equivalent of getting slash-dotted: Daryl Cobranchi, who writes a homeschooling blog, linked to my cocktail-party-piece, and I was inundated by hits from his site. They continued today — and after reading around in his blog, I can believe that he has a large and loyal […]

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A cock’s tale

November 27, 2005

I was invited to a cocktail party on Friday night, and readily accepted the invitation (because I like the hosts and their invitation featured a picture of Nick and Nora Charles), despite the two facts that 1) I don’t own a cocktail dress and 2) I don’t like martinis, whether Manhattans, Gibsons, or whatever else […]

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Rough draft for a Black Friday Rag

November 25, 2005

This morning I read an interesting article about a singing iceberg, but more importantly, I heard the iceberg (link follows, to audiofile). Combined with the general level of continuing insanity, I was inspired to get the following rough draft onto paper (and now, inter-textually, onto the blog). Yeah, yeah, I know it’s not exactly Howl, […]

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