“Just So Science” on BBC Radio 4 has taken some of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories and biologized them—interviewing experts on animal behavior to provide a gloss on Kipling’s descriptions. The latest BBC segment, which you can hear here, deconstructs “The Cat that Walked by Himself”. It’s a 15-minute program including a dramatic reading interspersed […]
Today’s Google doodle celebrates 200 years of “Kinder- und Hausmärchen”, otherwise known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales (see the Telegraph story here. If you go to the site and click on the right arrows, you’ll see 22 images that tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood, originally known as “Das Rotkappchen” (“The Little Red Hat”). Have […]
Yep, that’s Darwin, with all the graphics made from bunch of real text from The Origin. It’s a Kickstarter project by Danny Fein, and you can get one of these (or Gatsby, Alice in Wonderland, or Moby Dick) by donating at least $30 at the link. Note, though, that you won’t get bupkes unless Danny […]
Well, the fall is both Republican and Islam Crazy Season. As if the riots and murders in the Middle East weren’t enough, now the lousy movie “Innocence of Muslims” has led to an increase in the bounty on Salman Rushdie’s head. According to The Independent, an Iranian religious foundation has upped the reward for his […]
UPDATE: Over at Choice in Dying, Eric MacDonald has his own take on the Bible as literature. He finds other passages of literary merit, but pronounced the book like a “curate’s egg,” i.e., good in parts. As a former Anglican priest, he is far more familiar with the Bad Book than I am, and his […]
An article by Bim Adewunmi in Wednesday’s Guardian,“‘Best of’ lists – what are they good for? Absolutely nothing,” takes issue with the British Film Insitute’s list of greatest films (see my post on this poll from yesterday). The article seems a tad tongue in cheek, so it may be a parody, but I don’t think so. […]
According to this morning’s New York Times, Gore Vidal died Tuesday in Los Angeles at the age of 86. An omnipresent and ascerbic figure on the literary scene, he was always engaged in squabbles with other literary figures like Norman Mailer, William Buckley (if you’re of a certain age you’ll remember that long feud) and […]
You thought I’d given up, didn’t you? If so, you don’t know me. Yes, I’m still reading the King James Bible, and am at the end of The Book of Ezra (p. 471). That means I still have 637 pages to go. When I think about that, my heart sinks to my feet. My pace […]
The phrase “other ways of knowing” (OWOK) has been used to justify the value of things like literature, art, music and, especially, religion, in telling us truths about the universe. “Other,” of course, means “ways other than science,” and here I construe “science” as “using empirical methods that rely on reason, observation, and verification or […]
OMG, there’s a treasure trove of photos of writers (or other literary figures) and their cats at the “Writers and Kitties: Archive” tumblr site. Two of my favorite subjects! I’ll post ten pictures here, but you’ll find elebenty gazillion others at the site. The first person to guess all ten writers gets my warm congratulations […]
