The strangeness of Hilary Mantel

Ho hum

Just can’t resist putting up this picture of an Australian Kelpie going about its business with aplomb. If you click on the picture you’ll see it’s dozing off. All in a day’s work…

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-23/abc-open-pic-of-the-week/6879862

Blurbling on

Slapped with a wet fish

Reading a newspaper article by a sympathetic journalist about a politician fallen from glory, Gert learned that some years ago when he had suffered a career setback, he was enormously comforted by some wise words from his wife. Can you guess what she said?

Jenny Erpenbeck: The End of Days

Rumi: take someone who doesn’t keep score

Travels among threatened languages

“Languages embody the intellectual wealth of the people that speak them. Losing one of them is like dropping a bomb on the Louvre.” (Ken Hale, MIT) 126

Postscript to Hamlet: Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive

We still haven’t reached consensus on whether or not Hamlet is fat (see The Paunch of Denmark), but here’s another question: is he, as Matt Haig says, “literature’s most famous depressive”?
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/depression-and-reasons-to-stay-alive/6814530

Magnus Mills: The Field of the Cloth of Gold

Freedom

What a lot of rubbish about “freedom” right-wing politicians throw around.