From Preface to “Medieval Technology and Social Change”, Lynn White Jr.
Voltaire to the contrary, history is a bag of tricks which the dead have played upon historians. The most remarkable of these illusions is the belief that the surviving written…
Category: time passes
“The Tao of Tetris”, nthposition, 2005
I have always been leery of stories too obviously Based On Real Life Experience. Herein, however, the bar, “American Pool”, the LeShan book, and the general milieu are very much…
Four score and more: Review of “Mortal Coil” by David Boyd Haycock
In contast to David Adam, this is a book whose place in my mental library has diminished rather than increased in the years since – to the extent I had forgot…
Interview with Bret Easton Ellis, Feb 25th 1999, University Observer.
This was I suppose the high water mark of my student journalism career. How it happened was this. Ken Early, now of Second Captains and the Irish Times, was editing…
Little egrets
In the last few years I have begun to re-engage with birding after a long hiatus. I wouldn’t quite say I lost interest in my teens; more than birding became…
Putting obscure places on the YouTube map
For a while, I have made artlessly shakey phone videos in a range of obscure, mainly Irish locations, and uploaded them to YouTube. There’s the “jumping church” of Ardee :…
The Dogskin Buoy. A post on The Dabbler.
From The Dabbler Facebook page , a post on this rather startling (to contemporary ears) role of man’s best friend: THE DOGSKIN BUOY Recently I read Dónal MacPolin’s “The Drontheim, Forgotten Sailing…
Anthony Burgess on decimalisation.
This quote made me wonder about the cognitive impact of decimalisation. There seems to be a consensus that cognitive challenging activities help to reduce and/or delay dementia, and I wonder,…
Séamus Sweeney 