What is Anarchism: An Introduction
WHAT IS ANARCHISM: AN INTRODUCTION By Donald Rooum, Freedom Press, London 1993 ISBN 0 900384 66 2 It has been many years since I have read a non-historical introduction to…
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What is Anarchism: An Introduction
WHAT IS ANARCHISM: AN INTRODUCTION By Donald Rooum, Freedom Press, London 1993 ISBN 0 900384 66 2 It has been many years since I have read a non-historical introduction to…
What is Anarchism: An Introduction
WHAT IS ANARCHISM: AN INTRODUCTION By Donald Rooum, Freedom Press, London 1993 ISBN 0 900384 66 2 It has been many years since I have read a non-historical introduction to…
Bread, Madness and Christianity
The witch craze of Europe is a popular, albeit often misrepresented, part of our collective history. Everyone knows witches were hunted, tortured and often killed – burned at the stake,…
The Fretful Porpentine
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine. That phrase just makes the modern reader stop and wonder. What, you ask yourself, is a porpentine? And why is it fretful? We never…
Bread Tales, Continued
This week I started a small batch of dough to bake later in the week, or on the weekend while I figure out a few details on my baking odyssey…
Burning Books, Burning Bibles
Pastor Marc Grizzard, of Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, NC is back in the news this week, but I’m not really sure if it’s because of something he did…
The Circuitous Path from Bulge to Budget
If tinkers may have leave to live, And bear the sow-skin budget, Then my account I well may, give, And in the stocks avouch it. Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale,…
Anti-Intellectualism: The New Elitism
There’s a growing – and disturbing – trend in modern culture: anti-intellectual elitism. The dismissal of art, science, culture, philosophy, of rhetoric and debate, of literature and poetry, and their…
Words, words, words
Writing before the arrival of the internet*, Bob Blackburn commented on the nature of exchange on then-prevalent BBS (Bulletin Board Systems), words that could as easily be written today about…
Survival of the Fittest
Charles Darwin has long been associated with the phrase, “survival of the fittest.” For a century and a half people have used it to refer to their understanding of his…
Are we alone? More importantly, are we even awake?
The “man the life boats and head for the stars” answer to our present human dilemmas is simply delusional. We can and should explore space, but if we don’t get…
We are Stardust… and Viral Genes
In her classic song, Woodstock, Joni Mitchell ended with the chorus: We are stardust Billion-year-old carbon We are golden Caught in the devil’s bargain And we’ve got to get ourselves…
1927: Ads, Layout and Typography
As promised, here are the first 20 scans of the ads from the 1927 North American Almanac I recently mentioned. If there is interest, I’ll do another set later this…
Hijack the Starship
Nineteen seventy. A great year for music, and a sad year, too. The death of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin.* Many of the great acts were kicked off their…
1927, a Year to Remember
1927. It was the year America sent troops to Nicaragua, forcing a US-supervised election. The year Alfred Hitchcock released his first movie. And the year when Fritz Lang released his…
Simple pleasures and the greatest of treasures
Ok, it’s that time. Time to put down the pen, or in this case, the keyboard; start cooking dinner – very slowly, for maximum flavour – and cut the grass…
Poor Lao Tzu: He Gets Blamed for So Much
Poor Lao Tzu. He gets saddled with the most atrocious of the New Age codswallop. As if it wasn’t enough to be for founder of one of the most obscure…
The Eyes Have It
This summer my mother was diagnosed with macular degeneration. There is no cure. It is irreversible. It simply progresses. Science has some hope for future cures, and has some treatments…
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…