I have previously, I think, complained that Academic Publishers Who Are In The Habit Of Charging An Arm, A Leg And Several Internal Organs for the works they produce, except for the brief period when they hold their annual sale, whatever they are doing with those ill-gotten gains, they are not spending them on due diligence in the editorial process ( Read more... )

Something to do while waiting for your flight instead of browsing the duty-free? Helsinki airport is decorated with stuffed hares and wolverine, and much of its rich animal life - beavers, lynx, bears - can be shot under a strict licence system.

Enquiring minds wish to know whether licences may be obtained in the departure lounge and whether guns ( Read more... )

From: UNITED NATION ( Read more... )

Seriously aaaaargh subheading in the Guardian G2 online version (I haven't seen the dead tree version today, some delivery problem):
Why it's simplistic to blame government cuts on students turning to prostitution, says Deborah OrrWe discover, on reading the actual article, that she doesn't believe that it is just cuts in funding that are driving ( Read more... )

This is an extraordinary story: As a young woman, Celia Robertson's grandmother was a poet of enormous promise, feted by the Bloomsbury set and with a bright future ahead of her. By the end she was a paranoid old lady, living in precarious destitution. What on earth went wrong? (synchronicitously, I read a review of Robertson's book about her ( Read more... )

Another link-exchange spam:
( Bearing in mind that my website is nothing whatsoever to do with travel/car-rental related matters )

Announcement on the Tube this morning: 'There are delays on X line due to earlier late completion of engineering works'. My head is still spinning around from that one.

During my re-watching of Angel, I noticed with a mixture of horror and amusement that at one point a minion of Wolfram and Hart, evil law firm to all dimensions, hands over a business card. Reading 'Attorney's at Law'. Rejecting the hypothesis that this was, in fact, a greengrocer masquerading as an evil attorney, it gives me to wonder whether ( Read more... )