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Links and Lindisfarne
So I was listening to CBC's Music and Company this morning, trying to convince myself it was a good idea to get up (and you know you're in trouble when Figaro's first song from the Barber of Seville isn't chipper and cheerful enough to make you leap out of bed, but that's another story), when they got to their web links segment, and I rediscovered ( Read more... ) -
Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan
For years I have thought of Richard Dawkins as (among other things) an English version of Carl Sagan, and a voice sorely needed after Sagan's death in 1996. And it was heartening after reading Dawkins's latest book, The God Delusion, to go to the website and hear him say "Promoting science as poetry was one of the things that Carl Sagan did so ( Read more... ) -
A very good book
I've just read Alessandro Baricco's An Iliad, and it is the best book I've read in a very long time. A compacted version of the incidents of the same story (he originally wanted to perform a reading of the original, but realizing it would take 40 hours, started to make interventions), told from a variety of first-person viewpoints. Most notably, ( Read more... ) -
My insomnia's treacherous imagination
So one of the things that suggests to me that I might really be a software developer after all, and not simply a writer manqué (though I am him, too), is that after reluctantly discarding the idea of dropping my insomniac vision of a three-dimensional laser scanner on Hengest (hey, if Rowenna can remember forward 150 years to 597, and no that won't ( Read more... ) -
Link salad
I am the very model of the basileia makhetes
I think I first saw this on the old academic ANSAX-L discussion list. (What it was doing there, I've no idea, but it was incredibly funny and still is.)
And Java programmers would probably also enjoy (with a side dish of mild horror) the bit of this entry starting with "For the lack of a nail". -
The Real Thing, and a flashback to 1991
Saw Soulpepper's The Real Thing (Tom Stoppard, 1982) tonight. And it reminded me of a drunken squabble I overheard back in my second year of university, outside YZ Angel Court of Trinity College, somewhere between 1 and 2 of the morning of 21 March:
male voice (low, terrible) Let go... let go of me...
m.v. How could you do it?
female voice ( ( Read more... ) -
For Caia
Who was, and always will be, the noblest Romana of them all.
Good night, dear heart,
and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.