Most hardcore poker players have read Peter Collett's The Book of Tells, but making Presidential hopefuls debate standing up does have some negative impact upon the respective candidates' circulation, and Senator John McCain is not a young man.

With that blink rate, however, and excluding other factors, he was mostly holding a pair of threes at

Courtesy of helice:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/features/kiss-of-death-black-lipstick-but-not-everyone-is-a-fan-941300.html

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Kicking the Sherlock ( Read more... )

Via helice:

'ROME (Reuters) - A 25-year-old man who tried to kill a priest by stabbing him in a Rome church has told police that he did so after the watching the film "The Da Vinci Code" and believing himself to be the anti-Christ.'More here: ( Read more... )

...Douglas Rushkoff is currently "guest-blogging" over on Boing Boing. His entire intro piece is amusing, and well worth a read, but this line in particular leapt out:

"It's hard to figure out how to make traffic flow in a city originally designed for cars..."

Yes, Doug. Try figuring it out for one originally designed for horses.Read more... )

Douglas Adams' widow has sanctioned an "official" new Hitch-Hiker's fan-fiction monstrosity volume by some...children's lit author or other:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/17/douglasadams

Topless Robot often goes over the top with a news story like ( Read more... )

It's probably seasonal, and bolstered by current political circumstances, but the fallout from Fish's Save the World on Your Own Time has overflowed into my Inboxes again this week. (The jury's mercifully out on whether or not Sarah Palin would try to ban it ( Read more... )

"Harry Potter author JK Rowling has won a US court battle to stop the publication of an unofficial book on the boy wizard.

Judge Robert Patterson ruled in favour of the writer and Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc after they claimed The Harry Potter Lexicon was in breach of copyright..."More here ( Read more... )

...the BBC replaced the 404 Page Not Found message with an official Press Office release a couple of days later. The Merlin website is up and running properly now, of course: http://www.bbc.co.uk/merlin

So, for The 39 Steps, and leaping forward in time a little further to Christmas, I'll ( Read more... )

...and Miliband is far too blinded by his own hotheaded ambition to take any notes from history.

But I hope someone sitting around that EU table has read Chapter 7 of Digby Smith's excellent 2005 volume, The Decline and Fall of Napoleon's Empire: How the Emperor Self-Destructed (Greenhill Books ( Read more... )

Re: ericblair_diary.

The underlined hyperlinking of words like "wheat", "barley", and "Horse-chestnuts" to their relevant Wikipedia entries is not only downright distracting, it's starting to raise quite a few questions about the diaries' intended online readership ( Read more... )