Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

On the recommendations of a friend, I made a trip back to Julio’s last night to score a bottle of Anchor’s “Our Special Ale”, a.k.a. “Christmas Ale 2008“.
Actually, when I say “a bottle”, what I really mean is “one regular bottle for drinking now, and one magnum for taking home to share with the Boys”. [...]

I’m normally not much for ordered lists, and especially not ordered lists of “favourites”. I tend to break things down into relatively low resolution buckets and am happy with that. For instance, with music I tend to assign a song to one of {Awesome, Good, OK, Tolerable, Terrible, OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP} and [...]

Have I talked about Dr. Bronner’s here before? My searches say not, but I remember expounding upon it recently–although it might have been at my poker game.
If you don’t know Dr. Bronner’s, I’m not even sure where to start trying to explain it.
The short version is this: my shower contains a bottle of liquid peppermint [...]

You may also remember my pleasant surprise at how much I enjoyed Titan’s first collection of Nemi strips. I’ve been reading the strips online fairly religiously since. The second collection of strips also showed up today, and I’m quite looking forward to going through it to see which, if any, of the strips collected in [...]

Hey, remember back in June when I wrote a bit about how much I was digging The Explainers?
Well, it appears the mainstream media has caught up with me1.
The Sunday Book Review in the New York Times reviewed the book this weekend. It was the cover review. Here’s an excerpt:
Of course, representing any Feiffer strip with [...]

I have previously mentioned how thrilled I am with Lewis Lapham’s current project: Lapham’s Quarterly. The current issue, which focuses on education, is a fine and marvellous read.
Actually, the cost of the issue is more than justified just by the introductory essay. Lapham is on fire. Here’s a little bit:
Why would any politician in [...]

While thinking about the use of torture by governments today, I found myself wishing I could just make everyone watch Closet Land1. Of course, I’ve lamented before about the fact that there is no DVD edition–at least no english one, although I did get my hands on a spanish one that at least lets me [...]

My goal is to redefine the whole history of rhyme
‘Cause the only way to free the soul is to free the mind
And no wisdom as old as this should be confined
To total mystery, so we’ll just read the signs
And DaVinci codes, and try to see the science
In this linguistically-composed pristine design
–extracted from Rhyme Renaissance by [...]

Over at the blog Steven Brust shares with his roommates, the question was posed about the “golden books“–those ones that because you hit them at just the right time, and they were just the right thing, made a lasting change in you, and how you interact with the world.
I didn’t comment there, but I’ve been [...]

My musical crush on Montreal blueswoman Dawn Tyler Watson continues. While “Hey Hey” is still the top of my playlist, some of the covers from the recent En Duo album are climbing up.
For instance the cover of Patty Griffin’s tune “Wiggley Fingers” (lyrics) on the album is pretty amazing. Something about Dawn’s voice, especially when [...]

After four years of wearing only solid colour1 t-shirts for everyday wear–primarily a habit I developed during my daughter’s infancy, as between her and I several shirts a day were suffering various stains, and I wanted cheap, “hot swappable” clothing–I am starting to pick up a few new interesting printed shirts. (Yes, I have lots [...]

Because I have a young daughter, I spend some time every week looking at various clips of dancers on YouTube, for her entertainment.
I’ve seen some pretty amazing stuff, but today I saw one that is hands down the most amazing thing. It’s a performance at the Circus Festival of Monaco, by two dancers, Wu Zhengdan [...]

I read a lot of science fiction. I have, since I was a kid–the first novel with no pictures I ever read was A Wrinkle In Time. The first “adult” book I ever read was Foundation.
When I was younger I had the opportunity to read a lot of the early short work in the [...]

I’m still loving almost every one of the TED Talks, but every now and then one pops up and really grabs me by the collar.
Here’s the one that really hit me this week.
This is a presentation by photographer Chris Jordan, where he presents some of the images from his exhibition, Running The Numbers. (At the [...]

You know the drill–some things that I found worthy of some comment:

I quite liked Julie Rehmeyer’s short piece on the math scholars who accidentally solved an astrophysics problem. It’s got all the good stuff: pure math, astrophysics (come on, “gravity lensing” just sounds cool, even without any context), serendipity, and above all a good science [...]