My great-grandfather was born in the year 1830, and in 1848 he was a drummer in the army, and as a drummer-boy he took part in the fighting on Charles Bridge. The students dug out cobble-stones from the paving there to throw at the soldiers, and they hit great-grandfather on the knee and crippled him for life. From that time on he was granted his ( Read more... )

In a hilariously unintended coincidence, Jasper Fforde seems to have his own theory to answer my question from the previous post ( Read more... )

I've always wondered who the "extras" in my dreams are? You know, the people in those group scenes whom you don't interact with, the crowd shots in your dreams when you're doing whatever it is you're doing. They seem to be only there to try to decieve you into thinking that the dream is reality. Who are those people? They can't be new people ( Read more... )

There was a retort in this colony to every accusation. There was always a blacker corruption elsewhere to be pointed at. The scandelmongers of the Secretariat fulfilled a useful purpose - they kept alive the idea that no one was to be trusted. That was better than complacence. Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I ( Read more... )

1) An obscure and alarmist media critic once wrote, "In America we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves." Write about a time when you were denied this fundamental right. How did it make you feel ( Read more... )

Huzun, the Turkish word for melancholy, has an Arabic root; when it appears in the Quran (as huzn in two verses and hazen in three others) it means much the same thing as the contemporary Turkish word. The Prophet Muhammad referred to the year in which he lost both his wife Hatice and his uncle, Abu Talib, as Senettul huzn, the year of melancholy; ( Read more... )

Ok really this is a rant about U of T and Rosi, but I was so inspired by listening to Common, as I always am, that I had to put that as my subject line ( Read more... )