Why academia is offensive – when difficult questions offend
Continue readingHistory
Rapid Alter[c]ation
Change comes quickly and unexpectedly
The remarkable speed with which the recent changes have taken place in Afghanistan reminded me of words spoken 2500 years ago in Israel:
Continue readingDiversity increases?
There was a school class which comprised only fifteen boys – it was a privileged area and the boys, unable to cope with competition from hard working girls, had been segregated – one of whom had black skin and two had brown, the rest all had white, perhaps you could say albino, but that may be misunderstood. The class was therefore racially diverse.
Continue readingOf the burning of books there is no end
Dowlais – steel works
When steel matters
The events that are shortly to be related took place in a different age and a different culture, in an altogether foreign location in the broadest sense which was unknown to the people of that time, but is now known to us as a consequence of the work of Einstein in the early part of the twentieth century. It was the time of railroads, steam trains, iron mills, steelworks, coal-mines and dirty work, when undertaker meant more than the entrepreneur and entrepreneur was an unknown word. The prosperity of a municipality could be measured, at least in part by the number of railway stations that it boasted, but better by the quality of the steel produced there and it was from one of these small towns towards the upper end of one of the rolling Welsh valleys that a principle undertaker in the steel industry received a telegram from a bridge and engineering fabricator in North Africa who wished to discuss the procurement of a quantity of steel for the provision of the building of a new bridge across the Niger.
Continue readingExistential statements
Coco thought he would keep it simple in this post and just make a big existential statement, but what in reality Coco was thinking was to discover just how many characters had to be written before the ‘see more’ message appears, and to provide a short introduction to his new art work, which has not yet been refused by the Tate and goes by the same name. This is not enough, as you can see, or rather cannot see, yet. The words ‘see more’ have not yet appeared.
Continue readingThe new normal
Let us eat….
It has been overshadowed in the last few days by the passing of a great man. The Duke is rightly to be remembered and his life celebrated for all the good he has done and in the idiosyncrasies that he displayed. His death reminds us that life does not remain the same; time moves on; until now in recent days, and I suppose that it shall return, there had been much talk in these parts about what the new normal will look like. I don’t know what you hear elsewhere, but what we hear doesn’t sound to me very much unlike the old.
Continue readingUnseated
At great risk of being misunderstood, it is very clear that the age of chivalry is over. The most senior of the other two should have given up his seat for the lady. Perhaps the difficulty they had was that the first one to have stood would have been claiming precedence over the other 😉
Continue readingTriptych
The uncovering of an ancient gold mask in China has caused a few ripples on Weibo, so Coco thought he would join in the activity. However as he does not have a Weibo account, and probably would no longer have one after this post anyway so it makes little difference, the post had to be made elsewhere, and out of respect for anyone who may read this and wishes to retain their own Weibo account, placed his images else where.
Continue readingInanity?
Sonic backgrounds: Obloquy to the message.
I thought I would say something really important. After listening to yet another performance of Götterdämmerung, and I hasten to add lest already I have given the wrong impression, that it was a very good performance apart from the ‘Bravo’ hurled out at the end. The voice, by the way, which penetrated the air was very similar to that which resounded at a different, and much reduced, performance in the promenade concerts many years ago. It seemed that the utterer of that earlier bravo may have listened to the rebukes of his peers at the quite untimeliness of the oral intrusion of his voice on the earlier occasion, ah, but me! I have been distracted and consequently left unfinished, an error which my better grammaticastic friends will not let me forget, a sentence which now lacks both a subject and a verb. Let me start again with what I really intended to say. Just for the sake of distraction: Did you notice the importance of the second comma in this paragraph?
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