Should crafty lawyer trespass on our ground,
Caitiffs avaunt! disturbing tribe away!
Unless (white crow) an honest one be found;
He’ll better, wiser go for what we say.*

What wears black, talks a lot, occasionally hangs out at murders, and is intelligent, aggressive, and generally little-loved?

Yes, that’s right.

Seems to me there are worse things than being compared to crows, however. I have a lot of respect for these loud, shiny birds — for corvids generally: jays, ravens, rooks, crows, magpies — mostly because they do interesting things, which is to say that I think they’re “smart.” And in . . . [more]

Bach is the best.

Better than all the other big B’s — Buxtehude, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Bizet, Berlioz. . . . Better even than the M’s — Mozart, Mendelssohn, Mahler . . .

Foolish thing to say, though: that one composer at that level of excellence is “better” than another. Surely “different” is the right word. But for me, Johann Sebastian is the bees knees, il miglior fabbro, Napoleon brandy, the MVP.

Now I know that baroque music is not to everyone’s taste: it’s been called “sewing-machine music” because of the underlying ricky-ticky, rum-tum-tum lines that keep the . . . [more]

This little piggy went to the market,
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
This little piggy had none,
And this little piggy cried wee wee wee all the way home.

Yes, but which piggy’s which? Who had the roast beef?

Maybe your brain is too far away from your toes to care. Or maybe the Adam in you is exhausted by the long march down to the foot and falls unconscious at the arch after muttering a brilliant “Big toe, little toe… ” Whatever the reason, your three toes in the middle are innominate and . . . [more]

We called it black and white, but in truth it was all shades in between. It was how we saw movies, how our photographs looked. And somehow the eye didn’t blench or weep for want of vibrant reds. We made up the colours in our minds, perhaps — it’s difficult to remember the ur-experience now that Dorothy’s landed in Oz and LCDs play across a full 60 inches — or perhaps we simply didn’t care about colour, pushing through to the essentials such as the story or the memory of an event.

Nature anticipates the greyscale with its retinal rods . . . [more]

My answer to the perennial question of which comes first, the chicken or the egg, is a resounding: egg. Yes, I enjoy a roast chicken, that celebratory meal, as much as the next carnivore. But I am enamoured of eggs.

So are the rest of us, if Agriculture Canada is to be believed. They tell me that the average Canadian eats a whopping fourteen dozen eggs a year in one form or another. Good for us, bad for us: the terrible science journalism in the newspapers keeps whipping back and forth on the subject; and all the while the . . . [more]

Context is everything. Which is simply to say res non ipsa loquitur. Things need more things near them to achieve meaning, significance, import — perhaps even for us to see them. That lump of metal there . . . near the edge of a smoking crater? or on a pedestal in a room hung about with paintings? Big diff.

Now, lumps of metal don’t have as their primary function the carrying of meaning. Words, though, do. Which is to say context is routinely consulted when we utter. Goes without saying — without awareness, most of the time. Some folks, . . . [more]

Yes, you heardright: stealright.

I haven’t joined the Anarchists Who Nick; I think the kleptocracy we already have is quite powerful enough, thank you; and though I’m old enough to remember Abbie Hoffman and “Please Steal This Book,” the fact that he sold more than a quarter of a million copies of the damn thing kind of took the edge off that razor for me a long time ago.

What I’m on about isn’t even your run of the mill P2P stuff but rather A2A, perhaps: artist to artist. Or, better, artist from artist. Because that’s what artists do, it . . . [more]

Everybody wants to be somebody else. At least it sometimes seems that way to me. I must lack the drive to alterity that motivates a lot of folk: so, for instance, on Twitter I am @fodden — than which few handles could be more staid and stolid — while the Twitterverse is decorated with millions of colourful keladinyms, such as @DeweyDecibel, @sarahcuda, @brundle_fly, @TheTweetOfGod, @sassygal22 (arriving a little late, it seems), and @etcetera.

Now, were I to pick a nickname, I wouldn’t go for brevity but rather for sonority — what someone (Twain? Dickens?) describing a law firm name . . . [more]

In my next life I shall be an architect. I already have a couple of pairs of eyeglass frames suitable for the role, and I once had a corduroy suit, albeit of the wrong colour. But, perhaps more to the point, I’m an inveterate maker. Not for me, though, big buildings or bridges. No, I’ll build dwellings — and, by preference, small houses. Cabins, if you will.

Surprisingly, there’s quite a lot of competition out there for the job of cabin builder. And even more enthusiasm for the business of dreaming about building cabins. Indeed — you’ve heard of porn, . . . [more]

I’ve used Wikipedia since its inception but only came across its portals the other day. Remember portals? They were like books — no, more like books of notes for books — in which the portaler structured a topic and linked out to webpages chosen to be relevant and interesting (“curated” we would have said last year). I suppose that they fell into disuse for a bunch of reasons, two of which would be Google and link rot: In a somewhat scary way, a Google search result is a kind of portal, especially when supplemented by a Knowledge Graph, itself . . . [more]

Only a fool says “nuncle.”

Used to be part of my favourite mock Elizabethan phrase, feeling good in the mouth: “Prithee nuncle…” But now I know that there never was a “nuncle”. I had thought it was one of those English words that shed the initial “N” because of the possessive “mine” or the indefinite article “an” on account of the way the combo got pronounced: “My nuncle” / “A nuncle” –> “mineuncle” / “anuncle” –> “mine uncle” / “an uncle”. In the world of linguistics this is known as rebracketing (or metanalysis, which sounds too grand to me), where . . . [more]

By the time you read this, it will have been long decided. But whether, as BuzzFeed claimed, the loser of the Canada-U.S. men’s semi-final Olympic hockey game “gets to keep Justin Bieber” could take some time to emerge. That’s fine by BuzzFeed, which will have moved on with nary a backwards glance, relentlessly retailing its highly popular olio of entertainment disguised as news and news disguised as entertainment.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that BuzzFeed has a style guide. I suppose I shouldn’t have been shocked: a multi-author, multi-million-dollar publication is a serious matter, regardless . . . [more]