I Didn’t Know That…
One of the great delights of learning is to be able to read or hear something new, something unknown, something that challenges the mind or your previously formed ideas and…
books
The (sometimes violent) urge to write
As of this writing, I will have published 253 posts since I began this blog at the ending week of December, 2011. Two hundred and fifty three posts in 21…
Why Spelling Matters
Sometimes I despair when I surf through the social media. Technology has empowered everyone to be able to comment, to post their stories, to share their opinion. Yet it has…
Shadows: a Blog Tour
Recently, I heard about Tundra Books doing a blog tour for Paula Weston’s “Shadows”. I have done a blog tour for Tundra Books before, and it was a great experience.…
The Key of Keys
Egoless divine pride: the most glorious concept I have ever heard – from Tibetan Buddhism. The Uttara Tantra elaborates: There once was a prince, who lost his memory and forgot…
In Wildness is the Preservation of the World
The title of this post is a quote from Henry David Thoreau’s essay, Walking, published posthumously in 1862, but which he wrote and rewrote during the 1850s. I was thinking…
Empire of Illusion and the End of Literacy
I don’t know whether to feel vindicated, delighted, frightened or depressed as I read through Chris Hedges’s book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.…
Three Archy poems by Don Marquis
pete the parrot and shakespeare i got acquainted with a parrot named pete recently who is an interesting bird pete says he used to belong to the fellow that ran…
Summer Reading List
A compendium of 100 biases in the way we all think, described in easy-to-understand language, The Art of Thinking Clearly should be required reading in the provincial government these days.…
The Thousand and One Nights
I had no idea it was this sexy. The Thousand Nights and One Nights, aka The Arabian Nights, aka The Thousand and One Nights – it’s really wonderful, steamy stuff.…
Hell 2.3
Before I carry on with my exploration of Miriam Van Scott’s Encyclopedia of Hell, I wanted to note that I just got my copy of her other book – the…
Hell 2.2
Might be time to recap my reasons for writing this series. New readers could get confused about the content in the Hell posts, of which this is the fourth. They’re…
Hell 2.1, a small update
I left you in my exploration of the Encyclopedia of Hell pondering which version of the Faustus story was better: with or without his final redemption. Personally, I prefer without,…
Hell 2.0
I left you last time after finishing the letter D, in Miriam Van Scott’s Encyclopedia of Hell. I’m back in book form to take you through a few more entries…
Kill the Apostrophe? Rubbish! Keep it!
A site has popped up with one of the stupidest ideas about English I’ve read in the past decade or two. It’s called Kill the Apostrophe. Subtle. At first, I…
Teddy’s Words of Wisdom
I’m not a great student of American history – my tastes run to other places and people: Napoleon, Casanova, Elizabeth I, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, China…. but…
What in Hell…?
Hades, you know, isn’t a place. It’s a guy. The Greek god of the underworld. His territory consists of a bunch of domains, including the rather unpleasant Tartarus, where souls…
The sum of all knowledge
In his 2004 book, The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs tells of his quest to become “the smartest person in the world” by reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover.…