My grandmother, may she rest in peace, was a remarkable woman. I’ll write a full post on how awesome she was soon. But right now, I just want to point out that she was a librarian. She started at the University of Washington in 1930–the autumn after the crash. She studied to become a librarian–what was […]
I’m trapped in the Dublin airport indefinitely because high winds are stopping my plane from landing. Boo. In the meanwhile, this quote from the LRB (along with a super hot taxi driver) made my day: The other great thing about the Rugby World Cup has been one of the best sport-related tabloid scandals for some […]
When I headed off to university, my mother didn’t tell me not to drink. Or even not to drink too much. Obviously both would be futile when advising a university student anywhere in the world at any point in history. So instead, she gave me my first rule of drinking: 1) Only drink when you […]
“Blake Glover, 30, a stylist, said that he and his partner, Austen Sydara, 23, a retail buyer, imagined a wedding with a “Brideshead Revisited” theme, because they loved the movie.” -Here come the (stylish) grooms [NYTimes] Yes, and it ended so well for the Marchmains…and Charles, for that matter. Even the first, halcyon section of […]
”With the exceptions of the top-lit centrally planned Roman Catholic church of the Holy Rood in Abingdon Road, it is hard to think of a single public building of any distinction in Oxford, outside the University, dating from the first three post-war decades: an indictment all the worse for the fact that these decades saw […]
Así se expresa uno de los más grandes artistas de nuestra época: Rodin. (So says one of the greatest artists of our time: Rodin) –Mexico City’s cathedral website Rodin, of course, died in 1917. Say what one will about the failings of the Church–and I won’t deny that it has failings–one must admit that it […]
“so you’re taking it from both ends?” -coworker Stephen Andrew’s phone got stolen on Saturday night at a pub. We called the useless Metropolitan Police almost immediately. Because he had Latitude enabled on his phone, and because the wifi was on, we could tell the police, almost to a house, where the device was at […]
In 2003, just before I moved to England, a bunch of us went to Washington for what is anachronistically called ‘sailing weekend’. Breakfast at the Supreme Court. Lunch in the Senate. Tea at the Library of Congress. Lunch at the Cosmos Club. Things like that. It was all delightful, of course. But two parts of […]
Quote of the day: “Well, there’s a difference between cumming and orasming…” –dinner last night I’ve convinced Andrew that it’s a good idea for us to have people around to dinner on Saturday evenings that we’re both in town–somewhat shockingly, that only seems to be 5 or 6 Saturdays per quarter. Last night was our […]
In my Rules for Bicycling post I mentioned paintballable offences, so I thought I’d provide a little bit more detail on what I meant by those. The basic problem, as I see it, is this: in our modern world (or at least in our modern metropolis), there aren’t enough societal units through which people can […]