General

This has been a public service announcement, for all my friends and colleagues looking for funding.

Indeed, I am a pedant. Wanna make something of it?

It’s crap; is it also art? Walking down to visit a friend last night, I spotted something odd on the pavement. Holy crap, I thought, I need to get a picture of that. Nobody will believe me. Yes, that’s dogshit. Yes, that’s a beautifully lettered sign stuck in it on a toothpick. It reads, roughly, [...]

The McRib’s unique aspects and impermanence, many of us believe, make it seem a likely candidate for being a sort of arbitrage strategy on McDonald’s part. Calling a fast food sandwich an arbitrage strategy is perhaps a bit of a reach—but consider how massive the chain’s market influence is, and it becomes a bit more [...]

  That Murmuration video is getting a lot of mileage as people marvel at the flocking behaviour of starlings. I liked the way grrrlscientist took the opportunity to kinda sorta explain how starlings do it, even if the average reader is little wiser. OK, so they are tracking up to six of their nearest neighbours; [...]

Puzzled by an advert in yesterday’s Repubblica, but without time to check it, was very pleased to have Jess point me to this wire story. Italy’s top chef teaming up with McDonalds – ANSA English. The “Vivace” (vivacious) is a burger topped with bacon, salted spinach, marinated onions and mayonaise with mustard seeds. The “Adagio” [...]

In a flurry of texts yesterday I thought I might have come up with a potentially useful neologism: to maltweet, and hence maltweetment. I was wrong.

He was nine years old; he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was dear to him, he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye, and did not let anyone into his soul without the key of love. His educators complained that he did not want to learn, yet his soul [...]