In which I discover Mavis Beacon Isn’t Real
You can learn something new every day. Years ago, I learnt touch typing and sporadically honed what skill I have with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. I always vaguely assumed there was a real…
Category: oddly enough
Aristotle’s Illusion (via Tim Hunkin and Lord Kilmarnock)
A while back I was reading the entertainingly gothic ghost story Ferelith by Lord Kilmarnock, and came across this passage: At last, after four years of waiting, I stumbled on the…
Did Captain Molesworth lose his bet?
From Andrew Ward’s Golf’s Strangest Rounds: “At 5.20a.m. on a September morning Captain Molesworth set out for a busy day at the Royal North Devon Golf Course. To win his…
Beshoff’s Chip Shop Founder was Last Survivor of Potemkin Mutiny
From his 1987 New York Times obituary: Ivan Beshoff, the last survivor of the 1905 mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin, a harbinger of the Russian Revolution, died Sunday, his…
”the most sane fringe phenomena.”
The current New Yorker features a piece by Brooke Jarvis on the maybe-extinct, maybe-not Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine. About fifteen years ago I had a cryptozoological phase, with occasional relapses.…
Escher on video and in Lego form
The Escher Museum in the Hague have a page with lots of Escher videos Here is an excerpt from a National Film Board of Canada film which elegantly animates Escher’s…
Submissions to “Miscellanea: A Transdimensional Library”
I have previously noted that online publications that do me the honour of publishing me tend to go out of existence. Another example was Miscellanea: A Transdimensional Library. It was…
Everyone loves a rogue
Messing around with WordPress’s “Pages” feature, I have created a page devoted to my posts on “rogues” (broadly defined … probably I should just say “eccentrics”) Anyway, here it is
Séamus Sweeney 