Anyone who is interested in following my new blog from Livejournal can add this link to your friends list:

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/livingspicily/

Thanks to Trey for setting that up for me!

Over the last few years, I've found myself becoming a half-decent cook. Not a great cook, but a good one. I can look at a recipe and use it as a base for my own ideas; I can even freestyle with generally good results. I'm not super-creative, but I'm a decent kitchen craftsman ( Read more... )

I can say honestly and without exaggeration that Queen is not only the best band ever, they are the best anything in the entire history of Earth. It's all downhill from here, folks ( Read more... )

Which of the following is more attractive to you?

1. Being able to write as a day-to-day job. IE, you get a decent salary to write every day, and that is all you will ever get paid.

2. Writing with little possibility of ever getting recognized, but with the possibility of making an extremely large amount of money if you are.

I’ve written before about how the opening few lines of Hamlet are among my favorites in all theatre. As always, Shakespeare does a magnificent job of setting the tone of the play. He manages to convey so much with so few words. We see two soldiers. They’re not at war; they’re on the battlements, doing routine patrols. They might be clowns; this ( Read more... )

(This was mostly written on 7/18. I've got a few older entries that never got finished I'm trying to polish off over the next few days ( Read more... )

Howell, the Canadian who’s the head of the program, just said the following to me, in response to my request to shift classes around (we’ve got two days this week with six hours of classes, and an afternoon trip to Parliament; next week, we’ve only got two hours of class a day.)

“No, we can’t do that, I can’t change the times. Anyway, you don’t ( Read more... )

So a concept that's important in law is that of "the reasonable man." The reasonable man is a special kind of animal; he's not an average man, necessarily. He doesn't speed, for instance; speeding is unreasonable, even though everyone does it. We often ask if something was objectively reasonable; would the reasonable man have done the same thing, ( Read more... )

"The American patent system's statement is that anything under the sun is patentable, as long as it's made by man. So, the legal test for a patent seems to be: 1. Is it a thing? 2. Is it man-made? 3. Is it sub-solar?"

Was the 605th richest man on Earth. The top 1% are very, very rich people. The top 1% of that are monstrously rich. He's in the top 10% of THAT - the top 10% of the top 1% of the top 1%. I'll admit, the numbers impress me. The speech was nothing special; he's speaking at Oxford, he doesn't have a college education, he made a big deal of it; but not ( Read more... )