This will hurt me...

Here is an old building down here in Salamanca that now houses luxury apartments, an art gallery, a gym and a hair salon. I'm not sure that the old crowd of convicts, prostitutes, drunken sailors, scallywags, scoundrels, reprobates, degenerates, ne'er-do-wells, rouges and rotters would be welcome around these parts any more. It’s all three hundred dollar sunglasses and designer pooches these days. I have been looking at a report that I am currently working on, and pleasantly note that I am trying to do my best to keep the use of lovely words alive and well in the sterile, mundane and (frankly) pitifully constructed word of public policy. That said, I’m not sure what the insipid automatons of the field make of me talking about ameliorating harm, adroit policy shifts, a conflation of interests, diffuse reasoning, ephemeral outcomes, eschewing simplistic solutions or indeed the preponderance of nebulous ideas set before us. I have a propinquity for beautiful words but t...

I must admit to not being a huge fan of the whole LOLcat phenomenon . The pedant in me has a tendency to get frustrated with the (deliberate, I hope) poor spelling and grammar. Of course, I have little time for textspeak or leetspeak or any such nonsense. Yes, I do understand that it is simply a new way of interacting and a genuine 'voice' of a subculture, I just happen to think that it is stupid, and makes the people who use it look stupid. Hence the LOLHenry that I created the other day, and have posted today. Aside from an inevitable dumbing down of the language (and the standard mode of communication itself), I resent that most LOLCats make felines look like a bunch of ignorant morons. As a unabashed fan of the feline (and apologies to any relatives of Phil Jaques reading this), I feel that the sort of simplistic, inane and poorly constructed nonsense most LOLCat discourse resembles is far more suited to dogs. The canine is infinitely more likely to speak in such a crude...

Did you know that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) can dish out a PG-13 rating for a movie that features an "intense depiction of very bad weather"? Well it can. All Movie has an entertaining little article today on some interesting wording choices by the ratings board when rating films. Thus, rather than a simple but bland "containing violence", the MPAA allows for a bit of flair to warn viewers that the classic 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up doesn't just feature any old violence, rather "non-stop ninja action". And after reading that, I want to now see the Ivory and Merchant biopic on Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson in Paris . I mean, it's far too rare an event these days to see a good, old-fashioned bawdy puppet show ! Bawdy enough to rate a PG-13.