File this under “I’m getting crabby as the evening wears on”: Study finds that good looking profs get better student evaluations than bow-wow looking ones do. Doh. Once again empirical sociology proves beyond a doubt that life is totally predictable. I suggest handing out bags of balloons and pots of paint with every evaluation form […]
A while back I mentioned the dispute in Germany over Ted Honderich’s book, After the Terror. Now there’s an American response by Richard Wolin, Are Suicide Bombings Morally Defensible? in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Good read; this is the conclusion: Was Honderich’s endorsement of Palestinian suicide bombing anti-Semitic? Technically, no. Yet it could easily […]
Since we’re getting close to Hallowe’en, here’s my favourite emblem. It represents a credo to journey by — one more step and you’re over the cliff, but man, what a ride! “The Fool: Complete freedom and trust, new journey, lack of fear, wonder, adventure. Perfect love casts out fear.” Well, that’s my little “occult” moment […]
Thanks to Frank Paynter for pointing to Christopher Hitchins’s piece, Mommie Dearest, wherein Hitchins elaborates on the scandal of Mother Teresa’s beatification. Note that MT called abortion “the greatest destroyer of peace,” which is an obviously fanatic and anti-human/ anti-woman statement, worthy of scrutiny and criticism by itself but especially now in the wake of […]
Today my daughter announced finding the credo George Bush lives by. It’s reprinted in her socials studies textbook, Michael Cranny’s Pathways; Civilizations Through Time, p.223: So it follows that a prudent ruler cannot, and should not, honour his word when it places him at a disadvantage…. If all men were good, this precept [rule] would […]
How do referrers work? This is my referrer page, and I often check it now, if only to marvel at how often someone googling “toe cleavage” lands on my blog. It’s never “big toe,” or “George Bataille.” No, just cleavage. (Huhn, ass cleavage, more like…) Just looking at it now, I see that someone reached […]
Friends, build your arks. After a record drought this summer, we’re now deluged with 100-year-record-breaking rains. It began on Thursday, continuing into Friday. Victoria logged 91 millimetres (just over 3 1/2 inches) before Thursday was done; Lower Mainland areas were much more badly inundated by the next day (up to 150 mm). On the weekend, […]
wood’s lot links, via The Literary Saloon, to The Guardian which yesterday published Susan Sontag’s acceptance speech for the peace prize of the German Book Trade, delivered at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week. [See my entry from October 12, too, for additional damning perspectives on Daniel Coats (not that he needs them, but he […]
Dawn Paley of the sparklin weblog has put a succinct article she recently wrote online, outlining the BC Liberals’ agenda and its effects. Although I live in a city and almost never venture into the wild, I found these facts the most telling: Believe BC, a high budget advertising campaign initiated by the BC Liberals […]
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