Ragged Clown

I was bored with my wordpress theme and Stu’s fresh look made me decide it was time for a refresh. This is my third theme and I wanted to go right back to basics this time rather than copy an existing theme. I started from the most basic theme template I could find – Starkers […]

I’ve always assumed that humans were the only animals to laugh and that the cute noises that dolphins and chimps and friends make are just coincidentally similar to human laughter. I might be wrong, if this finding, described at Animal Wise holds up. As they progressed with their research, Panksepp and his colleagues found that […]

I’ve been following the RSS feed for Thinking Aloud. It’s a series of interviews with philosophers and other thinkers, asking about topics where philosophy meets our everyday lives. The quality of the interviews has been mixed at best. I loved AC Grayling’s but, then, I always love his writing. Others, not so much. Today’s interview […]

Those twilight moments between waking and sleeping.

Stu has been complaining again about the lack of a good iPad client for blogging. I have too. I’d blog a lot more if I could do it from my iPad. I keep coming back to the official WordPress client and it keeps surprising me with how lame it is. I’m now on the hunt […]

This, frankly, is what blogging is all about. I love getting comments on my blog from strangers and this one, from tbwuser4, was one of the finest. I am a newbie here! I would like to exhort firsthand friends, debased to down ideas and learn more knowledge. Scheme you deal with up identical’s turn without […]

#occupygooglereader is a cry of from the heart of Reader readers everywhere who quietly enjoyed the trickle of articles shared by friends real and virtual on Google’s wonderful RSS Reader. It was a a small feature and I bet no more than one in a hundred used it. I liked to tap the little share […]

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villian by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent […]

The Captain of Piratefest.

The Hacker’s Diet gives us two tools for bringing wayward eating under control. The first one is the little red dot that says your weight is trending upwards. As you can see, i’ve been ignoring the red dots for too long now. When you ignore red dots, your daily deficit turns into a daily excess. A […]

Every English schoolboy knows that history began in 1066.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. Steve Jobs

The opening chords – Dun dun daaaaa – still give me chills 30 years later.

Rhapsody’s service has been spotty recently so I thought I’d try Spotify to see if it is all it is cracked up to be. And the verdict is… …it’s OK. But like every other music app I have ever tried it doesn’t do one the thing I want a music player to do. I want […]

Bought the wifey a new camera a couple of months ago. She has been snapping away in the garden and entered her first contest a couple of weeks ago with this: From hundreds of entries, she made the top ten and, if there is any justice, she’ll end up in the top three (at least!).

Of all the trends in modern political discourse, the most ridiculous is the tendency in certain circles to go searching for things to be offended by. The latest group, The American Atheists, claim that including a pile of rubble – that looks a bit like a cross – in a museum dedicated to 9/11 was an […]

I’ve been on the Hacker’s diet for about 20 years.

I’ve always thought of automats as lonely, melancholy places.

I’m learning, with RadioLab, to speak to the animals.

The News of the World began Murdock’s journey to media domination nearly 40 years ago. Let’s hope it ends it too. We always knew you were shit. But we never knew you were this shit. It says here that the unions will never learn It says here that the economy is on the upturn And […]

The History of English continues with the Norman invasion. Tasty fact: cow, sheep & swine came from English but beef, mutton & pork from the French.

I love learning about the history of English. I love the Open University and I especially love the fact that they put all of their courses online. It’s almost enough to make me want to finish my OU degree. In my day, you had to get up at 6:30am to watch boring lectures and tweed […]

How did people experience paintings in the old days?

Have fun little clowns!