Marcus Aurelius
I continue to be profoundly moved by the wisdom of the classical authors. It’s often hard to accept that some of them were writing two or more millennia ago: many…
reading
What’s in a missing word?
There’s a line in one of Horace’s epistles that really caught my eye. In Latin it reads: Utque sacerdotis fugitiuus liba recuso, pane egeo iam mellitis potiore placentis Horace: Epistles,…
Reading: A Canadian tragedy… or not?
The map above might show the making of a serious tragedy for Western and especially Canadian culture. It indicates in colour which nations read the most. Yellow is the second…
Milton: A Master of Run-On Sentences
MILTON: A MASTER OF RUN-ON SENTENCES: I'm about halfway through the collected works of John Milton. It's a project that's taking some time. Mercifully the poetry is at the front…
Milton: A Master of Run-On Sentences
MILTON: A MASTER OF RUN-ON SENTENCES: I'm about halfway through the collected works of John Milton. It's a project that's taking some time. Mercifully the poetry is at the front…
Milton: A Master of Run-On Sentences
MILTON: A MASTER OF RUN-ON SENTENCES: I’m about halfway through the collected works of John Milton. It’s a project that’s taking some time. Mercifully the poetry is at the front…
Milton: A Master of Run-On Sentences
MILTON: A MASTER OF RUN-ON SENTENCES: I’m about halfway through the collected works of John Milton. It’s a project that’s taking some time. Mercifully the poetry is at the front…
Archiving past posts
I spent a busy weekend copying posts from my previous blog (hundreds of posts, currently archived on another server awaiting my resolution) onto my hard drive. I plan to resurrect…
Looking back on 2103
It’s been quite a year, both personally and politically. The best of times, the worst of times, to paraphrase Dickens. Looking back on 2103, it was a busy, eventful, successful,…
Dictionaries: Concise, Compact, and dacoit
Dacoit: noun; one of a class of criminals in India and Burma who rob and murder in roving gangs. A member of a band of armed robbers in India or…
New studies show babies have basically decent impulses and are strongly driven by moral imperatives
More research shows once again that compassion, empathy and mutual aid, and an instinct toward cooperation, are innate in human beings, confirming what the great Russian biologist and anarchist philosopher…
My conversation with Robert Chazz Chute
I’d encourage you all to check out the Cool People Podcast this week, in which the host (and fellow London, ON author) Robert Chazz Chute, and I discuss the singularity,…
You’re invited to Indie Author Night
I’d like to invite anyone who is the region of London, Ontario (or all you readers with some cash or frequent flyer points to burn), to come to a reading…
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,…
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…
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…
Something so basic, yet so different stands between us
You’d think it should be this easy: just take a bread machine, throw in all the ingredients listed in the recipe, push a button, wait, remove loaf and eat. Yum.…
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…
Literary Fiction Enhances Empathy in Readers
Literary fiction, not popular fiction, can make people better understand one another according to a new study. Because literary fiction (i.e. books not for sale at airports) focuses on the…
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…