i had met a lot of strange people in my day, but none as strange as nagasawa. he was a far more voracious reader than i, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least thirty years. "that's the only kind of book i can trust," he said.

"it's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but ( Read more... )

happy b'day to franz (ferenc) liszt ... 200 years old.

i am suggesting that most people now are living on the far side of a broken connection, and that this is potentially catastrophic. most people are now fed, clothed and sheltered from sources toward which they feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility.... we are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. most of us cannot imagine the ( Read more... )

"christ has risen." whoever believes that ( Read more... )

fundamentally, the command of god ... is self-evidently and in all circumstances a call for counter-movements on behalf of humanity and against its denial in any form - and therefore a call for the championing of the weak against every kind of encroachment on the part of the strong. the christian community has undoubtedly been too late in seeing ( Read more... )

i found this figure fascinating: the north american lottery system is a $70 billion-a-year business, an industry bigger than movie tickets, music, and porn combined. also, i'd never thought about using the lotto to launder money, or trying to plunder the lotto. interesting article here.

also, mad men. i don't watch tv, but people sure seem to love ( Read more... )

books read in 2011:

five plays - gerhart hauptmann, trans theodore h lustig
moby-dick - herman melville
invisible man - ralph ellison
the road to serfdom - friedrich a hayek
under the volcano  - malcolm lowry
a short history of nearly everything - bill bryson
theft: a love story - peter carey
right ho, jeeves - pg wodehouse
foe - jm coetzee
the cenci - ( Read more... )

in our local paper this week, i read a brief article discussing whether canada should eliminate the penny. be that as it may, what caught my attention was what one of our esteemed members of parliament had to say on the topic:

"i can't, for the life of me, think of any reason why flaherty wouldn't act on this immediately. [...] these little things ( Read more... )

who has ever used sliced zucchini as an oven mitt before? i think i may be onto something ...

i went out driving in the mountains this afternoon, with my buddies wolfgang and giacomo. my vw rolled over 90,000 km, and i tried to absorb the images of the foothills covered in pale green pasture and dark green and bright yellow trees. autumn is so beautiful that i ache. later on, i stopped for the worst americano that i've paid money for and ( Read more... )