It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader. Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are...
...I have become more interested than ever in the effect of a diet higher in 'greens' than it is in meat - both in terms of my own wellbeing and, more recently, those implications that go beyond me and those for whom I cook.
Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! ...
...only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others.
I've never really been star struck. I was a little bit taken aback when I was doing a chat show recently and I was sat in the make-up chair chatting to a guy say next to me but I couldn't look round and see who it was, it was only when I got up I rea...
There are so many different Batman fans, and all of them approach it from a different place. You have the people who have only seen the films and only know Batman through the Burton or, more recently, the Nolan films. And those people are looking for...
I just recently joined Twitter. It's very positive - I love all the accolades. If my ego is hurting, I can just open my Twitter account and see 'Oh, I love you! I love the show!' and it's great. I'm trying to find the balance between trying to be fun...
I learned hard lessons in life; I had to because I had so much happen: My mother died my sophomore year in high school. The next year, same day, my brother dropped dead. Two years after that, I got married because my girlfriend got pregnant. The year...
So it is always preferable to discuss the matter of veganism in a non-judgemental way. Remember that to most people, eating flesh or dairy and using animal products such as leather, wool, and silk, is as normal as breathing air or drinking water. A p...
I was assigned to the Waffen-SS but was never involved in any crime. Besides, I always felt the need to write about my experiences in a larger context one day. This has only developed recently, now that I have overcome my inner aversion to writing an...
Bernadette: We've only recently discovered that young Anthony here, bats for both teams. Mitzi: I do not! Felicia: Oh, so we're straight? Mitzi: No. Felicia: Oh, we're not. So we're a donut puncher, after all? Mitzi: No. Felicia: Then what the hell a...
These days, my main guitar amps have been Magnatone. They're beautiful. Magnatones have actual tremolo, which I recently learned about guitar amps. Often what guitar amps call vibrato is really just a volume Up and Down. But Magnatone has a true vibr...
One area where this misperception has hit hard has been research on child sexual abuse. Despite an explosion of research on the issue over recent decades, most research reported in the literature is focused on girls. There is significantly less atten...
Comeback records always worry me, especially when they're made by one of my heroes, and I'd heard stories about Gil Scott-Heron recently, about drug arrests and prison terms and other troubles. I wasn't prepared for the ravaged shakiness of his voice...
For all the advances in technology, science and communications, there are signs that we are failing in areas where it matters most: our personal relationships and society in general. The atomisation of society evidenced by the startling increase in r...
I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ...
A half-century later, Mark Twain would say that the gold rush drastically changed the American character, ending the tradition of patient apprenticeships, the gradual mastery of self, talent, and money. Gold created the get-rich-quick mentality that ...
Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.
The relationships among natural and drug-induced alterations of consciousness must be understood from an evolutionary perspective. This reveals altered consciousness to be related to endogenous mechanism, which are triggered by both ancient evolution...
The early removal from school of future officers of Britain's seapower, leaving them unacquainted with the subject matter and ideas of the distant and recent past, may account for the incapacity of no military thinking in a world that devoted itself ...
You know cats, always scratching on this or that, but never scratching what you want when you want it. (Like my balls, when they’re itchy!) I recently got him declawed, which sucked for him, but it was great for me because I was tired of always bit...