To complete the line of thought I started with yesterday’s post, there are now times that I encounter situations or books or ideas that make me think I might be becoming more conservative…or at the very least that I’m becoming a grumpy old man (an inevitability that I anticipate eagerly). As I’ve mentioned before, one […]
When asked where I fall on the political spectrum, I never know how to respond. My best attempts at a summary–‘contrarian’ and ‘liberal grumpy old man’–are only a little more comprehensible than ‘mongoose civique‘. I remember that when I arrived in Washington, DC, as a freshman at Georgetown I found the experience politically jarring. I […]
OH at Simpsons last night: “I’m a gentle lover” [followed by awkward silence] OH at lunch today: “If many keys open a door, we say it has a bad lock; if one key opens many doors we call it a master key.” (yes, more than a little metaphorical misogyny there. sigh). OH in microkitchen just now: […]
I flew home from Mexico City on Friday night. BA doesn’t have a lounge in MEX, so I got to pick between the lounges for Iberia, Mexican and American. The latter was out of the running immediately since I don’t believe in drinks vouchers in an airline lounge, but I ended up in the Iberia […]
Some books apparently demand review over and over and over again. I suspect it’s no coincidence that many such books cover seemingly sensational topics and end up being rather dull. I’ve noticed this with ‘ground-breaking’ technology books, like Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch, Eli Parsier’s The Filter Bubble, or Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams’s Wikinomics. The irony has never […]
I’m reading Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson right now. I’ve been hearing about it since I first applied to Oxford (yes, that was 9 years ago), so I’m a bit shocked that I hadn’t read it before now. I bought it because it was alluded to in something or other I was reading recently. Anyway, I […]
Okay. It’s official. I love the restaurants in Mexico City. A bunch of my coworkers and I went to Pujol last night. It was fantastic. Beyond fantastic. I had the meat tasting menu; there was a fish option, as well. 9 courses. I couldn’t understand a word off the menu (other than queso, the most important […]
I’m in Mexcio City this week for a big privacy conference. It also turns out I’m wicked jet-lagged. It was over eleven hours in the air, with a six-hour time difference (that expanded to seven since both Mexico and the UK ended daylight savings time on Saturday night). So here I am, sitting in my […]
I apologise in advance for what will no doubt be rather jumbled thoughts. Andrew & I have been watching the second season of Downton Abbey, which takes place during the First World War. At the same time, I’ve been reading a lot about the current moves to dismantle or diminish various public services in the […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about architecture and tradition lately, and so this quote caught my eye when I was reading Peter Campbell’s LRB review of the John Martin exhibition currently at the Tate Britain. The public, which can no longer look for common standards of taste, high craft and skill, is left interpreting a […]