As I said in the note about my retirement, I am now planning on becoming a full-time writer. So the question naturally arises as to what I am going to be writing about and what impact this will have on my blogging.
[Read more…]
Alert readers may have noticed that my brief biography at the top left has changed slightly to acknowledge the fact that I retired from the university. My last day was December 31st. I have had a long and varied career at many institutions before I spent the last 27 years at Case Western Reserve University and they were wonderful ones. The students we get here are just wonderful and teaching them was a joy and I have fond memories of many of them.
[Read more…]
Best wishes to all the blog’s readers for the holiday season, if and however you celebrate it, in whatever form you prefer to do so. I came across this short film featuring Mog the cat, a character created by Judith Kerr. Mog is the star of a series of children’s books. This holiday season the British grocery chain Sainsbury’s produced this film featuring a CGI version of the cat. I thought it was pretty good.
[Read more…]
Two young Brazilian men were filming a sketch for their YouTube comedy channel on a public street with a backdrop of an airplane when a woman driving by stopped and started ranting at them for being terrorists. It was quite incredible the amount of obscenities, racism, religious rubbish, and homophobic slurs she managed to cram into just a few minutes. I was impressed at how well the two men took it, managing to laugh at her while filming her.
[Read more…]
Whatever one might think about the merits of beauty competitions like Miss Universe, many, many people take them seriously, not least the contestants from each participating nation. The format is one of round-by-round elimination, leaving just three finalists, which this year were Miss Colombia, Miss Philippines, and Miss USA.
[Read more…]
Of all the periods of earlier times, we are probably most familiar with (or more accurately think we are familiar with) that of the Roman empire because of the heavy focus of commercial films dealing with it. But how accurate are the perceptions we gleaned from them? Dave Davies of Fresh Air has a fascinating interview with historian Mary Beard about her new book SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, where she discusses some of the myths about the rise and fall of Rome and describes what life then was really like, and discusses the many films and TV series made about that period.
[Read more…]
When we travel, we leave Baxter the Wonder Dog with a retired couple who live in another suburb and have their own dog. It is no doubt a source of some small income to them though given that they live in an upper-middle class area, I doubt that they really need the money. They will take up to one or two extra dogs at a time but most of the time Baxter has been their only guest. We like keeping Baxter in a home rather than a more impersonal kennel because he has the run of the house, gets walks and treats, and can play with their own dog.
[Read more…]
Abby Moss writes about how the phone sex business works, using the experience of her mother who needed money and had failed at many attempts to get a ‘normal’ job. Moss explains a puzzle, and that is how these paid services survive in an era of free pornography on the internet.
[Read more…]
On our recent trip in Sri Lanka, the coaches that we used to travel over the country would stop at points for people to stretch their legs, have something to drink, and use the toilets. And the usual situation occurred in that the line for men’s toilet was non-existent while that for the women was long, at least until I gave the women the all clear that the men’s toilet was unoccupied and they commandeered the men’s toilet for their own use until the line was cleared.
[Read more…]
Cricket fans will immediately recognize the name Sachin Tendulkar. Most of them would concede that he is one of the best cricketers of all time but among many Indians the admiration goes much further and he is venerated almost as a god, with even some Hindu temples being dedicated to him and some even referring to him as ‘god’.
[Read more…]