Title says it all. Suggestions?

From an unnamed book currently doing the rounds at Distributed Proofreaders, as quoted by one of the volunteers: And here let us remark, that this German prince, in order to read that work, was obliged to have the German translated into French by his friend Suhm, the Saxon minister at Petersburg. Chasot, who had no … Read More

So why did we attack Iraq? Not merely because it rhymes, I hope. Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps even Robert Newman’s guess is as good as mine. It’s certainly not as bad as the raison du jour that Bush and his cronies hand out. From his show History of oil: I was … Read More

Now there’s a surreal title for this entry. Speaking of Dali; in 1965 he donated a painting to Rikers Island Prison, on account of that he could not be there in person. The painting, depicting the Saviour on a cross, hung in the prisoner’s dining hall a good many years, until somebody recently decided it … Read More

Neuromancer is about a bank job. Case used to be an ace safe cracker, until he got cocky and took off with his customer’s money. They broke both his hands in retaliation. But that is what makes him perfect for this job: nobody will suspect he is involved. The team that is collected around him … Read More

At the Teleread blog, where I blog, regular visitor Roland Rohde was talking about the troubles he had with DRM, and in the run-up to his story he casually remarked that: “[the book] had a rather complicated installation routine, I can’t exactly remember what I had to do to get it working“. A book with … Read More

This reminds me of a Max Tailleur joke from our toilet. (That is to say, his book of jokes was our toilet reading material back when I was a kid.) A boy comes home from school and starts talking enthusiastically about what he learned during biology class. Apparently, they have been discussing evolution, and he … Read More

As you may have noticed, I started publishing old drafts. One was so old, it had passed its sell-by date and I had to throw it out. The rest needs a lick-a-paint here and there and will be up shortly. Removed from the blog-roll for inactivity: CoCo and Natasha. Added to the blog-roll: Wisse Words … Read More

Wikipedia used to have a warning label that said something to the effect that you had to take everything there with a grain of salt; which is sage advice for any encyclopedia. The idea being that a tertiary source like an encyclopedia can never be as authoritative as a primary or secondary source. (Let’s gloss … Read More

Had I mentioned that Maciej Ceglowski is in Beijing? The other day he accidentally wandered into one of the city’s most secret space travel facilities. He gets busted, and his feeble possessions investigated. At some point the fat cop walked in again to make another attempt at the cell phone, guards springing back to attention … Read More