Burglar and ex-Libertines singer Pete Doherty was caught in June carrying a flick knife. “If the law was to send me to prison it wouldn’t be able to look itself in the eye,” he commented after yesterday’s hearing, in what critics are taking as a clear rejection of the post-Surrealist aesthetic currently sweeping East London…
From an alert, Preventing Deaths of Farm Workers in Manure Pits, issued by the American National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health: On July 26, 1989, five farm workers died after consecutively entering a manure pit on their farm. The pit measured 20 by 24 feet and was 10 feet deep. The victims were a…
Seriously, if I write this blog in Portuguese, will someone invite me onto Orkut? Or am I better off just heading down the Brazilian bar down the street? All these do-good schemes always end up in trouble – just check the story of rioting at the Forum over in Lorna’s Shorts.
Mark Liberman points to an article by Laura Durnford on the Radio Netherlands World Service site which describes how the C17th Fort Oranje on the Hudson River and the town that sprang up around it, Beverwijck, was part of just one settlement within the Dutch colony of New Netherland. The other and more famous was…
One way of passing evenings when a talking pig looks like being the highlight of the televisual entertainment is to improvise stories on the basis of collections of found words. Here is a short Chinuk-wawa glossary, taken from an article by Nancy Bartley on the language revival which appeared in the Seattle Times: chinuk-wawa english…
There’s a mini-discussion over at Transblawg re the first use of the term “mobbing” in an institutional context. Matt Bulow says that a Swede coined this usage, although the author he quotes, Heinz Leymann, says he borrowed it from another Swede, Heinemann, who used it in education and had it from Konrad “Gooseman” Lorenz. In…
From Nat Geog, via Cronaca, news that Philippe Aries was at least partly wrong: Members of the London-based Society of Thames Mudlarks look very different today from the Victorian street children the group takes its name from. Where ragged waifs once searched for bits of bone and coal to sell, men in overalls, gloves, and…
I have been up the coast a couple of times this week (off again tomorrow) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many spring flowers. Their profusion is partly a consequence of heavy rainfall, and partly of the fires last summer that burnt away heavy shrubbery and young pine woods, clearing the ground. However,…
I once saw a pocket trumpet miraculously transformed by a car into something vaguely resembling a plate, but back in 1753 James Hanson and his father were condemned to transportation for trying to achieve the opposite without paying for the raw materials. This text is from the online proceedings of the Old Bailey: (M.) James…