Archive for the ‘Oddments’ Category

The Suck Fairy

Friday, October 1st, 2010

From Jo Walton at Tor.com comes the idea of The Suck Fairy, that scourge of re-reading that somehow curdles fondly remembered books upon second reading. Working alongside the Suck Fairy are her siblings the Racism Fairy, the Sexism Fairy, and the Homophobia Fairy, according to Walton.One might add the Bad ...

Today in History

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Image via Wikipedia Wikipedia about today. Here's what the BBC and NY Times have to say. A certain key event from 1961 is missing from all three. (But you could go read some F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories anyway or watch Jim Henson's early version of the Muppets ...

Old-world skillz

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Image via Wikipedia I do not know how Michael Leddy finds so many great items for his Orange Crate Art blog. I was struck by his link to this column by The Providence Journal's Mark Pantinkin on certain specialized life skills we (of a certain generation) accrued growing ...

Assorted links

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

"A comparison of the 2008 population — using data from a variety of sources — with the first census in 1881 shows that the number of Cocks has shrunk by 75 per cent..." Read the rest for the context. How to e-mail a professor. They may not notice, but then again, ...

Typology of New Yorker cartoons

Friday, March 20th, 2009

Given the diversity of talents who over the years contributed cartoons to The New Yorker, it may be surprising to learn that everything in our large cartoon bank has, for the sake of easy reference, been reduced to a dozen or so categories...The categories were as follows: arts and galleries; ...