Well, anyway, I came across this in today's Ask A Manager: I have a crush on an older coworker, and we’re hanging out outside of work. Honestly, I think he sounds insufferably up himself: For three years I worked with an assistant manager who was 15 years older than me. We got along so well and would have deep intellectual conversations and agree ( Read more... )

It's Thanksgiving, for my friends in the USA*, and it's International Men's Day.
And it occured to me that one can be very thankful for IMD, if only because it provides a useful and necessary riposte every 8th March to the blokes who come out from the woodwork to moan gripe and whinge Y No International MENZ Day? ('19 November, bozo'.)
It is ( ( Read more... )

Person with Book has writ back, and I get the distinct impression that they are hoping I will offer to read the ms and bring Mi Expertise to bear.
Perish the thort.
I am given to wonder whether I am the only person who has been approached in re this undertaking, and have put out a few feelers to other historians with some connection to the area as ( Read more... )

As I daresay my dearios are aware, it has long been an on-dit that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were more than good friends. They shared a beach house at Santa Monica for substantial portions of the 1930s, from up-and-coming to major stardom.
However, somebody has just written a book to say, no, no, they really were 'just good friends', and ( Read more... )

Guy believes that reason his dark fantasy story that he has been working on since high school is not getting published may be because he is a bloke, perhaps if he sends it out under a gender-neutral or female name, as women do so much better at getting published, he will be successful?
(We observe that he has had Mom, an English teacher, look over ( Read more... )

Came across some advice column thing recently where somebody the person writing pretty much would have been quite happy to hear had painlessly vanished from the face of the earth had been (or so they said) Doing Some Work On Themselves, and as part of The Process had written a letter to the person which really, DID NOT WANT.
I did wonder if the ( Read more... )

Question demanding the answer 'Yer WOT?!'
Every Saturday in the Guardian Saturday Review there is a feature The Books That Made Me.
There is a set of the same questions to each writer.
One of which is The book I give as a gift.
I depose:
a) Unless you're a scientologist or something of the sort, would you give the same book to absolutely everybody ( Read more... )

Okay, I am as much up as anyone for something turning up in archives which can be headlined thus: British state 'covered up plot to assassinate King Edward VIII':
It has all the hallmarks of a 21st-century political thriller, including a plot to assassinate a controversial monarch, an MI5 double agent, and claims of a high-level cover-up.

And, ( Read more... )

But when somebody boosts the merits of
eschew[ing] a legalistically minded obsession with safeguarding, and the low-trust milieu that such narrow proceduralism generates.

I think of all those other contexts in which people want to 'cut through red tape', like, oh, maybe food safety, and building regulations, and, and, - I think you get my point.

( Read more... )

Occurred to me a while ago - did I comment to somebody else's journal on this? I feel I mooted it somewhere - that lockdown brings about conditions approximating to the 'cut-off country house with restricted group of suspects' golden-age murder mystery scenario.
'4. What new hobby have you taken up during this? Devising cunning and undetectable ( Read more... )