Two more dolphins

I have to report this. I was reading the news this morning (5:34am) and came across this. The tallest man in the world, Bao Xishun, was summoned by veterinarians of the Fushun aquatic park in Liaoning, China, to do what previously attempted surgery had failed: save two dolphins. How? By inserting his 1.06 m arm down their throats [...]

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Puttin’ on the Ritz

This song is stuck in my head. The only problem is I can’t really sing properly. What Jeeves calls a “reasonably straight-forward syncopated 4-5 time signature”, is just a little too much for my mind. I suppose writing a paper on Marx, as I am doing now, does little to improve my appreciation of the lyrics.     

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Sonnet on the paper

We know the shock that strikes the soph’more face
When he encounters that disgraceful minus.
The letter “A” would have so much more grace
And be more fitting on his paper on Aquinas.
Those dusty books he got from SML
Were hard to find and did not cost a dollar.
Citing them did ornament it well,
But all quotations came from Google scholar.
What [...]

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WTO and humor

Imagine my surprise when researching the WTO and its history, I found instead the World Toilet Organization! Based in Singapore, they are planning to erect the very first Toilet College for the study of sanitation and every year organize the World Toilet Day (Nov 19). Their logo is a stylized toilet seat and their website [www.worldtoilet.org] features flags and [...]

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Sir Wilfred’s prison

Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery, character from from Waugh’s Decline and Fall, makes an interesting observation as to the origin of criminal behavior.
I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression. At last we have the opportunity for testing it.
[pg. 226]
In the preface to Trollope’s “Autobiography”, Michael Sadlier implies [...]

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One and many

The line that divides what is acceptable from what is not [be it in prepositions or a discussion of sort "Where do we draw the line?"] stems from a pragmatist view that there are requirements of precision and specification which command the extent to which one must create principles that may be accepted universally. Like [...]

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More from “Talleyrand”

Duff Cooper quips:
As the news came in [regarding the Coup of 18 Fructidor] he smiled by made no comment, continuing his game without interruption. He always arranged to spend the day of a coup d’état as comfortably as possible.
 [pg 97]
The last Director to be appointed to that office was General Moulins, a melancholy and quite undistinguished soldier. [...]

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Talleyrand on intrigue

I remember a description used by Machado de Assis which I find amazing. It goes something like this:
Were he one day to wake up and find himself emperor, he would only find fault with the tardiness of his minister.
Today I came across a similarly interesting description in a dialogue between a real emperor, Napoleon, and [...]

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Keep up; break up

In German – although quite complicated - this makes sense. The verbs separate themselves (in something Mark Twain goes to great lengths to ridicule in his ”The Awful German Language”) and the main part is immediately utilized while the separable prefix is placed at the end. But in English, the not-so-awful language, this prefix can go anywhere. There is but [...]

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Concert

We hosted our inaugural concert with Ravel, Chopin, Beethoven, Dvorak and Schumann. I was very happy with how many people showed up. We clapped, we listenned; now our name is out there. Next step? Keep up the beat.
The piano was quite the revelation. It has been locked and covered for so long I began to [...]

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