At first I thought, this is A Different Culture: (Ask A Manager, third one down): My manager complains when people don’t contribute money for life events.
Okay, I can see retirement, marriage, babies - but deaths in family? huh?
And on this heavying official level? Not only policing whether but how much?
In the earlier days at my workplace when ( Read more... )

If I were to be publishing the short stories of a given author in three volumes, with introduction and critical apparatus, information I think might be helpful to people interested in these volumes would be:
A LIST OF THE CONTENTS OF EACH VOLUME.
Okay, my own motivation in the matter was actually trying to find the title of a particular story by ( Read more... )

Oliver Burkeman, who meditates, on meditation.
There seem to be some points there which are of more general application than to his specific argument about meditation and its benefits or lack of same:
'my hunch is you have to really want to do it for it to work' -
Does this not, my dearios, similarly apply to reading, getting up in the wee ( Read more... )

A fun, well, relatively, afternoon in the British Library once I had reconciled myself to the fact that I thought I had ordered a volume of a periodical that the system didn't think I had (silly me, thinking that ordering a date span will bring up the middle year as well as the years at each end: yes, I am interested in a very narrow period of time ( Read more... )

No, really, in what scheme of things do you appoint someone as ambassador to a foreign power because the head of the government of that power considers them their good buddy?
Wasn't it always rather a thing in the Diplomatic Service that there was a perceived danger of becoming too close to Them even without entirely Going Native?
Recollect from my ( Read more... )

Being, perhaps, somewhat pedantically, even preciously, irked by Yet Another Thinkpiece going on about city/rural divide.
Because, really, surely most people in US live neither in big metropolises or in contact with the soil and the rhythms of nature in country settings? (my sense of modern agribusiness is that anyway it has little or nothing to do ( Read more... )

[N]ot everything in life can include everyone.... The other day, I heard a famous actor complaining that National Siblings Day (not an occasion most people have noticed) was an insulting kick in the teeth to only children, who have no siblings to celebrate. It did strike me then that we might be losing the crucial differentiation between “something ( Read more... )

Every so often, people with opinions (esp prob people paid to have OPINIONZ) will wring their hands and declare that Those People On the Internet Exist In A Cosy Confirmation-of-their-Views Echo Chamber.
Well, hell, yeah, most of the stuff I see on DW/LJ, FB, Twitter, etc, is coming from a position that is usually one that I can sympathise with.
( Read more... )

Following a train of thought which began, I think, with musing on the desire of meedja people to find an expert and then ensure that they say whatever the meedja people want them to say -

E.g. that approach from a radio producer that went dead silent when I expressed my scepticism apropos 'sifilis = geenyus'.

And then onto the idea of 'creative ( Read more... )

I have been guiltily aware that I still have not addressed the prompt that
( Read more... )