I've been reading a book about the American Civil War (James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom).

I really should have read up on this before. So much of modern American politics only makes sense with this as a background. Here's some of the stuff I've learned from it.

( Not quite as long as the war ... )

sushidog asked (in a friends-locked post):you have a time machine, in which you can make three (and only three) trips. You may use one trip to change something in your own past, one trip to witness a past event, and one trip to change the world. No cheating, any attempts to game the system will dump you in a primaeval swamp with no way back to the future. ( Read more... )

Hovis has had an ad campaign for years with the tagline 'As good today as it's always been.' I've just put my finger on what bothers me about it.

I hear it as 'Only as good today as it's always been', which is perhaps unfair. But even with a generous interpretation, it's clearly saying it isn't substantially better than it used to be. They've been ( Read more... )

I can't believe I'd forgotten this, but there's a famous appearance of parhelia in Shakespeare. Actually, I can easily believe it - it's in Henry VI Part 3, and I'm sorry to confess that all the Henry Histories rather blur in to one another in my head. The RSC did a production cycle of all of the histories a few years ago, and I did really want to ( Read more... )

An eclectic collection of ideas running round my head at the moment, in compressed format due to lack of time (and thus, in parts at least, likely to be incomprehensibly telegraphic (and overly parenthetical) at best and unclear and poorly-thought-through at worst), but with luck it will at least serve to get them out of my head ( Read more... )

Has any non-living primary resource valued by humans entirely run out?
( Where have all the gold nuggets gone ... )

I met an old friend at the weekend whom I'd not seen since September 11, 2001. It was very good to see him. And happily it looks like the date of this last meeting won't stay stuck in my mind indefinitely - plenty going on (e.g. Charles Kennedy finally resigning, cyclists mown down, Ariel Sharon still stuck on the roof and won't come down) but ( Read more... )

Just got a note from the Council about rubbish and recycling, complete with the wonderful instruction:

Please retain this leaflet as it contains IMPORTANT information.

I wonder if someone at the Council really wanted to write:

UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED

For those of you who weren't ( Read more... )

vin_petrol has a thing going in his journal about scars ... so I thought I'd post this tale of one of mine ( Read more... )

I should have been doing other stuff instead of that last update. But I've just had a brilliant insight.

Sellar and Yeatman, in their fantastic book 1066 And All That, revolutionised the understanding of History by pointing out that "History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember ( Read more... )