“Do we want to live on an Internet where such digital curiosities as Horse_ebooks are systematically stripped of their mythical qualities?”
February 2012
Motherboard interviews British philosopher Alain de Botton on religion, the changing role of art, and the Internet:
I am an atheist, but a gentle one. I don’t feel the need to mock anyone who believes. I really disagree with the hard tone of some atheists who approach religion like a silly fairy tale. I am deeply respectful of religion, but I believe none of its supernatural aspects. So my position is perhaps unusual: I am at once very respectful and completely impious.
Alain de Botton is on a Crusade to Make Atheism Smarter: An Interview | Motherboard
Geoffrey K. Pullum notices a charming eggcorn on a Yahoo Answers page:
My friends have been being really judge mental lately, i need advice? Kay so my best friends i have known and been friends with for about 2 years now, are being really judge mental around me lately. . .
p.s. eggcorn – “In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker’s dialect.” [Wikipedia]
Retired accountant, widower and accomplished tuba player Ted Wilson has a great series over at the Rumpus.net in which he reviews things… this week it’s circles (which he gives 5/5 stars), next week it’s apartheid. Last week he reviewed Cupid (3/5 stars).
I like circles a lot. I include spheres in the same family as circles. The mathematician across the street tells me spheres are not circles. I say he’s a square. Ha ha ha! That’s my joke but you can use it.
Michael E. Mann’s The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. – Slate Magazine
Feeling Anxious? Soon There Will Be an App for That – NYTimes.com
Seared Salmon With Balsamic Glaze Recipe – Food.com – 118010
Elementary: Outta My Way, Pops!
Money and Morals – NYTimes.com
Article: Google Maps Help Predict Meth Labs Before They Open
Yes anything goes – baltimoresun.com
The Obama Memos: How Washington Remade the President : The New Yorker
Article: WSJ publishes actual climate scientists’ letter on climate science
Geoff Dyer, writing for the NY Times Book Review, kvetches about the excessive use of the word “tireless”:
Like a tired person trying to get to sleep who is kept awake by sounds from the street that he or she has for years scarcely noticed, I found that the word had become suddenly unignorable. …
I was curious to see if there were examples of people using “tireless” in such a way as to make it seem less tired. Well, if there are I haven’t found them. It is so thoroughly used up, tired and worn out that no one seems able to bring it back from the dead — and yet, by drawing deep on its own essence, it remains absolutely tireless in its capacity to survive, like a verbal equivalent of the undead.