Says Jon Cusack of his new child, Jon Cusack v2.0: I wrote in the birth announcement e-mail stuff, like there’s a lot of features from version 1.0 with additional features from Jamie [his wife]. Fine, but someone explain to me how you put the release date back three months to enable glitch fixes. Via Boing…
I want to illustrate at ridiculous speed the change in status of Ficus carica – once found outside the back door of farmhouses around the Mediterranean – over the last couple of thousand years. Since you’re all familiar with Genesis 3, I’ll start a bit later, with the Ethiopic version of the Apocalypse of Peter.…
No, it’s not a Belgian joke: in Belgium you can send your email and have it delivered, registered, by a smelly man with a severe drinking problem, all for only €9.84. The business offering this innovative service, Certipost, is a joint venture between the dismal old state telecom and post businesses, Belgacom and De Post,…
This is good: the NY Times says that smart dealers are trawling eBay for misspelled items, buying them cheap, spelling them correctly and relisting them: John H. Green, a jeweler in Central Florida, is one of them. Mr. Green once bought a box of gers for $2. They were gears for pocket watches, which he…
In a country in which even traffic wardens carry guns, both ERC, the party of disgraced politico Carod-Rovira, and its youth wing, JERC, like to refer to ETA as an armed organisation. Why this vagueness? A wolf and a sheep are both mammals, but it seems to me important to be able to distinguish between…
Just a couple of Russian daisies for the chain: One of the aims of the great Russian spelling reform of 1917 was apparently to make War and Peace shorter, thus saving paper. It is strange then that socialists in the rest of the world ended up trading c for k, which actually uses more ink.…
Intrigued (and overjoyed, as always) to receive a mail from my good friend, Moses Aziz, in which he writes (my emphases): Dear Friend. As you read this, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, because, I believe everyone will die someday… I have been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer . It has defiled all…