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The landline

When you’ve forgotten your door keys, and the batteries in the doorbell are flat, and your teenage son can’t hear the door knocker, and he keeps his mobile on silent when he’s asleep, then a good, old-fashioned, landline phone is essential.   Photo onĀ Foter.com

A writer is …

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. Thomas Mann A great quote, courtesy of Michael Wade at Execupundit. Mann was a German writer famous for Death in Venice (remember the strangely haunting Dirk Bogarde film?) and The Magic Mountain. The latter made me aware of […]

A dictionary to go – Cultural Offering

I’m indebted, once again, to Kurt at Cultural Offering for this image and the steer towards the Oxford English Dictionary’s phone app. The splendidly bearded fellow above is James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. My own copy – of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary – was and still is an incredibly useful […]

John Perry Barlow on Cassidy

I came across this beautifully written piece from Barlow describing the origins of the song Cassidy: Then my father began to die. He went into the hospital in Salt Lake City and I stayed on the ranch feeding cows and keeping the feed trails open with an ancient Allis-Chalmers bulldozer. The snow was three and […]

Sad news: John Perry Barlow

Awoke today to read that John Perry Barlow has died. He was remarkable Renaissance Man: a cattle rancher, song-writing partner of the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir and a pioneer of the internet, co-founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. See the BBC’s obituary, here. And, the EFF’s announcement, here. Here’s Barlow talking about one of his Barlow-Weir […]

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