Month: August 2026
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Terms of art, art of war
I had a boss of whom it was difficult to say whether she was more deadeningly stupid or cruelly evil. She was a great one for strategy, and it was a big part of an utterly worthless management degree I undertook, so I have long been suspicious of that concept and its contradistinction, tactics. I…
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Freeze thy young blood
Horror has always been a closed book as a genre to me, because when I was ten I read a story than which I cannot imagine anything more terrifying. I was listening to Everything but the Girl’s version of “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” as I read, and if that comes on the…
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Childish
Lee Child was born in Coventry but moved to Birmingham in the hope of a better education. I wasn’t born in Coventry but was educated there, so this is by way of giving the man his due. You’ll have heard that he writes the slow bits fast and the fast bits slow; it’s true, and…
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No it’s not
It’s often said that it’s difficult to prove a negative, impossible even. It’s not, it’s easy, usually trivially easy. There is no prime number between three and five, which I can easily prove. I didn’t murder anyone in Antarctica five seconds ago. Etc.
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Quays and Worcester
Jericho Wharf has been acquired by Worcester College, Oxford and people seem on the whole pleased. I can’t imagine why. This is the College that bans “tourists”, i.e. the general public, from its grounds unless they live in OX1 or OX2 (two of the most of the most affluent postcodes in the country) or pay…
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Go figure
All similes are trivially true, because everything resembles everything else in some respect; and all metaphors are literally false, because everything is what it is and not another thing. I propose the existence of a third category, which I shall call counterfactual metaphor. An example is: “You could be a shadow, beneath the street light,…
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Rhyme time
I really like it when in lyrics and poems different parts of speech are rhymed, e.g. There’s a boy across the river but alas I cannot swim/I never will get to put my arms around him. Also when the (half) rhymes you get are not the ones you expected, e.g. There’s a house across the…
