Sentiments of the Season 2002 That’s Xmas, with an X
Hangovers, weight gain and sunburn. There's no escaping the axis of summer holiday evil, unless you are extremely self-disciplined or a party-pooper. Of course, the food and drink can be a lot of fun, especially when you're surrounded by the best of friends and family.
Lenin the bald-head Marxist
Had a very nasty foe
He was opposed by royalty
So of course they had to go (bang bang bang)
All of the evil bourgeois
Used to sneer and call him mad
They never let poor Lenin
Put in place his strategy for implementing a nationwide struggle to wrench the means of production from the parasites’ grasp and thrust it into the proud, eager hands of the proletariat to build a future in which all were equal and rhymes were the forgotten legacy of a debauched capitalist system! (Sung very quickly, with great anger)
Then one snowy October
Hist’ry came to say
Lenin with your theories great
Won’t you seal our cent’ry’s fate?
Then all the masses loved him
As they shouted out with glee
Lenin the bald-head Marxist
You’ll save us from Christ - mas - Treeeees!
· Treeeees [Lileks]
· Marx after communism [The Economist]
George Orwell
It still gratifies us today to read George Orwell: we feel ennobled by him. He was a complex man, and thus never an entirely honest one...
· Honesty [Boston]
Literature, Truth Nothing ... Reading in the Dark
Authored by Richard B. Woodward and published in The Village Voice, this article takes a look at the state of book reviewing in the U.S. today. Woodward is not very positive about the state of the art. This is an interesting article that shows that not all reviews are created equal and that some are more equal than others. It is worth reading just to get a taste of how the book reviewing world operates.
· Wood & Words & Truth of Fire [Village Voice]
Life Giving up the Ghost
Childhood was a sort of gulag for me, just as exile is for others. Few people acted with malice towards me, bar Ian F. and Michelle M. ... It was just that I was unsuited to being a child, or an exile.
· Childhood = Exile [LRB]
Internet Build a Better website
Ninety percent of Internet sites miss the point. They focus on the flashiness of the technology and not on the ease of navigation.
· web sites [Business2]
Spoiled Bra(t)s Where Rudeness Is A Status Symbol?
Bad behavior among politicians who have any power, is rarely punished. Same attitudes and rules seem to apply to Hollywood executives. In Hollywood and in many Parliaments people seem to confuse rudeness with power. People think that being rude and demeaning is somehow a show of importance when, to me, it just suggests that you're dealing with a lot of spoiled brats whose mommies didn't give them enough time-outs.
· Crime & Punishment I [Los Angeles Times]
Constituents of Trouble Makers
When Waverley police and a beach gang dubbed the Bra Boys, the Bra standing for the last three letters of Maroubra, decided to hold functions on the same night at Coogee RSL Club, it became the ultimate Christmas bash.
· Crime & Punishment II [SMH]
Philosophy has fallen on hard times.
Despite important developments in recent decades in philosophical accounts of thought and meaning, law and ethics, and knowledge and consciousness, the enterprise of philosophy is no longer taken very seriously nor accorded any special status in the broader culture.
Ayer’s philandering, Foucault’s gay sex, Arendt’s affairs. Why bother with hard analysis when cheap moralizing will do?
· Philosophers’ gossip [Boston]
