Saturday, September 15, 2012

Saturday, September 8, 2012

gone south ... back next weekend


















... of course, i won't be drinking too much, or over-eating, or talking loudly and slowly to the foreigners ... i'm sure you know me better than i know myself

Monday, September 3, 2012

Thursday, August 30, 2012

a bbc radio essay by sarah bakewell about montaigne




http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00xj0ys/The_Essay_Montaigne_Sarah_Bakewell/

and a link to her website

http://www.sarahbakewell.com/

and a brief summary of her career in her own words ...

‘I studied philosophy at the University of Essex. I became enthralled by the work of Martin Heidegger and started a PhD on him, but the spell wore off as quickly as it had been cast, and I dropped out to move to London and work in a tea-bag factory.

‘My job was to catch boxes of tea-bags spat at me by a machine, flip them on their sides, and push them in groups of six to the next person on the line. It was only for the first two hours that machine spat faster than I could flip, but they were the most memorable two hours of my life.

‘After this, I worked in bookshops for several years, did a postgraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence, and wrote fiction in my spare time, before landing a job at the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine. There, I spent ten fascinating years as a cataloguer and curator of early printed books. It was while cataloguing that collection that I came across the tales that started me off as a non-fiction writer: odd medical cases, and a mysterious, angry pamphlet by a “Mrs Stewart”, which became the seed of my book The Smart.

‘Since 2002, my main job has been writing. I also teach writing courses in both fiction and non-fiction, curate occasional exhibitions, and catalogue old books for the National Trust.’

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

yes ! of course montaigne had studied erasmus !


















i found out by copying the file containing the whole of montaigne's essays from project gutenberg

transferring it in to microsoft word

and then doing a simple word-search for "Erasmus"

just as well ... because the first reference the computer discovered, in the blink of an eye, was on page 949

the bishop says the right thing about mister blair ...























http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/28/desmond-tutu-protests-over-tony-blair?INTCMP=SRCH


Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel laureate and icon of the anti-apartheid struggle, has withdrawn from a seminar in South Africa in protest at the presence of Tony Blair and the former prime minister's support for the 2003 Iraq war.
"The archbishop is of the view that Mr Blair's decision to support the United States' military invasion of Iraq, on the basis of unproven allegations of the existence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, was morally indefensible," said Roger Friedman, a spokesman for the cleric, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1984.
"Morality and leadership are indivisible. In this context, it would be inappropriate and untenable for the archbishop to share a platform with Mr Blair," he added.
Blair's office said he was "sorry" that Tutu had decided to pull out of theDiscovery Invest Leadership Summit, which is due to take place in Johannesburg on Thursday, adding in a statement that the two were not due to be sharing a platform at the event.
"As far as Iraq is concerned they have always disagreed about removing Saddam by force – such disagreement is part of a healthy democracy," it said.
"As for the morality of that decision we have recently had both the memorial of the Halabja massacre, where thousands of people were murdered in one day by Saddam's use of chemical weapons; and that of the Iran-Iraq war, where casualties numbered up to a million, including many killed by chemical weapons.
"So these decisions are never easy morally or politically."
The seminar's website says that other speakers at the event will include the chess grandmaster and Russian opposition figure Garry Kasparov, and the former Tesco chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy.
Muslim groups in South Africa had called for Blair to be arrested for war crimes when he arrived in South Africa.
Mustafa Darsot, a member of the South African Muslim Network executive committee, told the Mail & Guardian newspaper: "Mr Blair is complicit in the murder of thousands of people in Iraq and should be tried for war crimes."
Supporters pointed to the arrestblair.org website, which describes itself as a site that "offers a reward to people attempting a peaceful citizen's arrest of the former British prime minister".
Such protests have become an increasingly common feature of Blair's life since he left office.
In June, a speech by him in Hong Kong on faith and globalisation was interrupted by an activist seeking to make a citizen's arrest.
In May, his testimony to the Leveson inquiry into the media was interrupted by an activist who shouted that the former prime minister should be arrested for war crimes.