Me, running the seminar on Wuthering Heights today: "That's a really great, if hard-to-prove, argument about Lockwood, by the way -- that he might be drawn to the 'adult' writing of Catherine Linton's name among the three versions scratched on the windowsill, as being more sophisticated than the others, since Lockwood himself is so pretentious, and ( Read more... )

On Belgium's "golden generation" of footballers: "In 2009, three years after the plan was formed, the results of the country's youth teams began to improve, just at the time the players had learnt not to focus on winning or losing, but simply improving...'The objective was not to move up the rankings but the result of having a better system meant ( Read more... )

When I was in sixth grade I tried out for the basketball team. I figured, hey, I enjoyed being on the soccer team, might as well try this out too. I never got the hang of basketball, though, perhaps because I had never watched it on TV. One day I was practising what I thought were decent lay-ups against the wall, and the teacher came over to me, ( Read more... )

So apparently my family might be related on my mother's side to a Lincolnshire man who married Cecily Plantagenet, one of the daughters of Edward IV. In the long evenings here on my own last winter I fell to playing a ridiculous computer game called Crusader Kings II, which gives you control of an aristocratic medieval dynasty in Europe from 1066- ( Read more... )

Must remember: go with the flow. It's important always to be adaptable.

Must remember: stick with the program. You made that plan for a reason.

Hello, Norway. You're an awful lot like rural BC where I grew up! Sitting on the shore of the fjord the other day, I could almost have been on Shuswap Lake, only without the mosquitoes and houseboats.

Woke up this afternoon wondering what the hell those intricate shadows were on my wall. Turns out they weren't shadows, and when I put on my glasses I realized that the light shining through the crack in the window upstairs had made a kind of pinhole camera and was projecting the south view of the cityscape around the Muinkpark upside-down across ( Read more... )

Joseph Conrad comments (1912) upon the great sea disaster: "He shook his head, and added: 'Ah! These great, big things, they want some handling.'"

Currently looking at "T. E. Shaw's" [i.e. T.E. Lawrence's] letters to
Bruce Rogers about their collaboration on Lawrence's translation of the
Odyssey:

You will not find me difficult about proofs, or a person who corrects
much. Pike, who re-composed the Seven Pillars, from the galleys which
the Monotype Co. sent in, was a jewel of a compositor: he used ( Read more... )

"The number of gumballs in a gumball machine is vastly disproportionate to the number of prizes. The house always wins. It is a sad fact that the profits from our business are dependent upon the disappointment of little children. "
      - Canadian Vending Magazine, May, 1965.