• It's depressing to think about how much of one's life is spent just waiting for something to be over.

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  • Orwell and God

    Or rather Orwell vs. God: a fascinating piece in The Spectator about Orwell's mixture of fascination and hostility towards Christianity. Thanks to Marianne, who linked to it in the comments on the previous post. 

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  • George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia This is Orwell's account of the six months or so that he spent in Spain fighting, or intending to fight, or recovering from fighting, on the Republican side of the Civil War. (In case your history is as hazy as mine, that was the side of the left-wing government, in…

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  • eCarlist

    I keep seeing ads for this and they're a bit startling: I think "I didn't know they were still around," not to mention with a web presence. Turns out, of course, that it's something to do with automobiles.

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  • Hem: Half Acre

    Weekend Music Someone pointed out the resemblance of last week's Camera Obscura song to one by Hem. Here's another Hem song, one of the best from their album Rabbit Songs. Lyrics here.    This is not my favorite Hem song, which is "The Part Where You Let Go", from an EP called Home Again, Home Again (which…

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  • It's more about his new venture, which is a series of carefully researched answers to questions like "What would happen if you pitched a baseball at 90% of the speed of light?"  But interesting for fans of the comic as well: A Conversation with Randall Munroe. (Short answer to the baseball question: 'The answer turns out…

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  • Cross-Dressing and Humor

    I started to say this in a comment on the Some Like It Hot discussion, but decided to make it a separate post so I could find it later, if the subject ever came up again. I can't explain why so many people find men dressed as women to be so very funny. But I have…

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  • And if so, what did you think? I was travelling and didn't see or hear any of it. I observe today that the pro-Obama segment of the media seems to be in all-out spin mode, apparently thinking that they have an opening to push their guy back out front.

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  • Some Old Movies I've been a little surprised over the past ten years or so to hear young people apply the term "old movie" to movies made as recently as the 1980s or mid-1990s. It makes perfect sense, of course, from their point of view. Or for that matter from a fairly neutral point of…

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  • And, sad to say, it's apparently not very good. I'm not surprised. The things that she did well in the Harry Potter books are not the things that make a good realist novel. An interesting thing about this review, and I guess about the book itself if one were to read it, is what it…

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