My Personality Neuroticism 57 Extraversion 64 Openness to Experience 98 Agreeableness 9 Conscientiousness 39 You are poised, confident, and clear-thinking when stressed, however you feel strong cravings and urges that you have difficulty resisting. You tend to prefer short-term pleasures and rewards over long-term consequences. You have a generally cheerful disposition. You are a moderately imaginative person who enjoys a… Read more →
Year: 2008
Hypocrisy on parade
There’s an evil tableau for you: the callous torturer stands up with blood on his hands and a lie in his teeth, while the priest draped in gilt reassures him of his righteousness. How often has that scene played out in history, I wonder? You know, I wouldn’t change a word in what Paul Myers says about the President-Pope meeting.… Read more →
Russell’s Teapot
Last night my mother sent me one of those horrible “email forwards”. She’s the only person with my email address who actually passes these hideous things on to me, knock on wood. This one was one of those tedious things that abuse casuistry to snark at people who put reason above faith–you know the type, the ones that mistake use… Read more →
Excuses, Excuses…
Regular effort was planned to resume here today–but the phoenix-like resurrection of Demonoid has distracted me. I did manage to update several plugins, and introduce the nifty new collapsable archives thing you will see at the right, though. Read more →
Say That I Was Foolish, Say That I Was Blind…
…NEVER say that I got left behind. I have not been here, because I have been driving ridiculous distances around North America to visit friends and to see the Oysterband live (third time!) I think I had an idiot grin on my face for about six hours after the show. I will be discussing this at length at some later… Read more →
More on The Wire
Apparently if I had been paying more attention to some of my sources, I could have taken advantage of being in Boston for work to pop into a lengthy panel at Harvard’s Institute of Politics last night on the topic: The HBO Series The Wire – A Compelling Portrayal of an American City. (Well, if I had been paying more… Read more →
Constant Subtle Reinforcement
A while back my wife passed me a PDF copy of an academic paper entitled “Polite, well-dressed and on time: secondary school conduct codes and the production of docile citizens” by Brock University researcher Rebecca Raby. The citation shows the paper as having originally been published in The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology; Feb 2005. Rather than link you… Read more →
More Santayana
While that last piece was read at Santayana‘s death, I’m slightly more enamoured with a piece he wrote on the death of a friend, simply entitled “To W.P.“. It’s not too long, so you could go read the whole thing. Here are two bits that particularly resonate with parts of my personal philosophy: Another, if I would, I could not… Read more →
The Poet’s Testament
George Santayana began as a poet, and, though he came to be known as philosopher, teacher and critic, a poet he remained. There was nothing blank, free or modern about his verses’; they rhymed, and what he had to say often sounded like a translation from the Latin classics, with which he was intimately familiar. When he died in Rome… Read more →
The use of time
Sunday: 3 hours of packing. 1 hour of back-and-forth. 11 hours of driving (5 hours of music, 6 hours of radio plays.) 3 hours of reading. Monday: 9 hours actually in the office. 7.5 hours of meetings.I normally have several hours a day of tele-meetings. Attending a meeting is much less onerous when it can be done with continuous partial… Read more →
It Can’t Be Done
Why? Why would you try to take not just one, but two “highly complex” novels and try to make a film out of them? Hyperion deals with a space war, with most of the action taking place on a planet named Hyperion, known not only for its electricity-spewing trees but also for the Time Tombs, large artifacts that can move… Read more →
Scottish protection rackets
Things I Learned Today #1: “blackmail” is a Scottish word, and the Highland Scots invented the protection rackets. World Wide Words: Blackmail The mail in blackmail (at various times also spelled maill, male and in other ways) is an old Scots word for rent. This was usually paid in what was often called white money, silver coins. It comes from… Read more →
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Is the Wizard Of Oz really a political cartoon?
Over the last couple of nights I’ve re-read all of Grant Morrison’s brilliant and bizarre run on the Doom Patrol. Some of this run was previously mentioned here in the context of a discussion of Borges and Serafini. (An aside: this run started almost 20 years ago! I am so old.) It’s great, great stuff, and if you haven’t read… Read more →
Today’s Must Read
TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo | Today’s Must Read More than five years after its composition, we finally see a copy of John Yoo’s March 14, 2003 memo to William Haynes, then the Defense Department’s general counsel. It was, as The New York Times and Washington Post report, a green light for military interrogators to use just about any technique… Read more →
