Small Beds and Large Bears

Someone somewhere is clearly suggesting to commercial organizations, including but by no means limited to Waitrose, that what they need to boost sales is to advertise fake special offers. The idea is that you put an oversized price sticker on the price-label slot along the shelf, to suggest that the price of that particular item [...]

I admire skepticism. Being cool-headed about empirical situations helps you make informed conclusions, and hence decisions, even as you might labour under the pressure of those situations.
Science constitutes formalized skepticism: strictly so in its theoretical, dehumanized sense; more approximately so in the way that scientists as a whole practice their craft. But science’s skepticism is [...]

K. and I were just listening to A Good Day for Airplay, a podcast from Montreal. For some time, assuming the presenter was from somewhere on the US east coast, I decided his accent was probably that of a native-born Israeli. But realising a few months back that it was actually Québecois made sudden sense [...]

In Vanity Fair, Thackeray continues to refer to the most morally upstanding member of his bizarre collection of characters as a hypocrite:
Conducted to the ladies, at the Ship Inn, Dobbin assumed a jovial and rattling manner, which proved that this young officer was becoming a more consummate hypocrite every day of his life. He [...]

Our recent work trip went surprisingly well, in the sense that it may actually have fulfilled its ostensible purpose of building a team. I cite as evidence the exception proving the rule: when we became a little tetchy part way through, it was the tetchiness of a family that has spent too much time together [...]

There’s a column in the Daily Mail that always reads like it ought to have been superseded long since by the internet. Dull, old people write “comical” missives on the meaning and etymology of words. It’s a preserved column, kept alive by the rank and file of the Mail’s more pickled readership, never venturing out [...]

Today, Paul Foot very helpfully explains the Biblical reference in his Guardian column’s title—“The beam in Bremer’s Eye”. He does this by giving us dictionary definitions of both the word “beam” and, presumably as background reading, the word “mote.” He doesn’t actually define the word “eye”, either particle, or the genitive suffix (all of which [...]

To illustrate the difficulties of top-down classical modelling, Sean McGrath has written a short piece on invoices and ducks. I’m not sure that the difficulties he discusses truly exist, as far as invoices are concerned. As any fule who’s argued with a finance department kno, an invoice is anything

detailing sums of money and
containing the word [...]

In the Review section of this Saturday’s Guardian, there was an article by A. S. Byatt about the mind/body dichotomy. Only a review article, it did a capable if unimaginary job of summing up philosophical and artistic thoughts on the subject.
However, about a third of the way into the article, Byatt states the following about [...]

The White Horse, the pub near work, is infested with equine euphemisms. Of course the toilets aren’t called “LADIES” and “GENTS”; of course they’re called “FILLIES” and “STALLIONS” instead. Now the sign for the gents reads:
STALLIONS& DISABLED
I can’t possibly think why. Perhaps calling them “THE LAME” is a bit too King James Version.