Honestly, where do I begin with the museum that was pitched as being about the suffrage movement and women's history in the East End, and turns out, just before opening, to be about Jack the Ripper? I think I will just direct you to
( Read more... )

I think my suspension of disbelief is always stretched by those plots which involve Our Protag setting up some incredibly convoluted long game in the service of vengeance or an elaborate con (or a combination of the two), involving false identity/ies and deception on a wide scale. And everything going exactly as according to plan.
However, if they ( Read more... )

Oliver Burkeman on various strategies alleged to Increase BRAYNPOWAH, and with some scepticism. The conclusion - that you can waste a lot of time trying to jazz up the little grey cells when you could be doing something else - sounded to me like it was crying out for comparison with the idea that getting the right kind of organisational software/ ( Read more... )

Not linking to interview with That Guy who teaches EngLit, but only works by Manly, Manly, Manly, MENZ, because he is currently getting nine bells codsmacked out of him and his urgent phallic look all over teh internetz, while digging himself deeper (hint: writers are supposed to be more careful of words and conscious of their power, not less).

Am ( Read more... )

For some reason I don't think I posted about the original exposure of this complex labyrinth of hoaxery, but there is an extended interview with the perpetrator in today's Guardian G2.
He hopes the large pile of books on his living-room table will guarantee his posthumous reputation.
Having myself cited an article he had in a reputable historical ( Read more... )

Riffing off on a tangent from a discussion somebody linked to:

One of the good things about being My Age is that if somebody (and in practice this has been a gender-neutral phenomenon anyway) makes an appreciative comment vis a vis the green streaks, I can assume it's just that ('Hey! today I saw this Cool Old Lady with green streaks in her hair ( Read more... )

People who produce lovely 'organic' 'artisanal' soup ranges, such as I find on the shelves of the local corner shop, with company names that suggest the bucolicly sound and reliable -

And when I read the ingredients in the small print, I discover that they nonetheless feel that it is quite okay to fall back on yeast extract or HVP to enhance the ( Read more... )

Sixth-formers pay up to £350 to cheat university admissions system Personal statements being sold to would-be students by internet companies.

WHUT.
The personal statements are a 600-word essay about the applicant, their interests and their life outside school. Admissions tutors use the statements as a way of getting a fuller picture of a candidate ( Read more... )

O dear John Banville - meet Mr Codfish:
Could the affair in the new novel have been narrated from Mrs Gray's point of view? "I don't think so because I've never understood women. Never will, don't want to. I'm in love with all of them, always have been fascinated by them. Not just for sex but because they always do the unexpected - at least I don't ( Read more... )

Piltdown Man: British archaeology's greatest hoax.... Now scientists aim to put an end to the mystery once and for all.

Haven't they got anything better to do?

And was it really 'the world's greatest scientific fraud'?

One is really so very, very glad that the perpetrators of the Dreadnought Hoax are wellknown to history, otherwise doubtless ( Read more... )