There are many ways for writing to come to grips with the contingent nature of life. One of the oddest has to be the prose of P. G. Wodehouse, which occupies a niche in the neighbourhood of nonsense, farce, satire, and fairy tales. It is as light as down, utterly lacking in apparent social import, and seemingly artless. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss it for any of these reasons. The writing is the product, in fact, of a brilliant mind and a great deal of careful labour, and it treats the poignant fact that we are all . . . [more]

The snow that’s currently blowing every which way is going to taper off at 5 p.m. and stop two hours later at 7. Then it’ll be partly cloudy for an hour (though dark, and, so, hard to tell in the city), after which the skies will be clear for the remainder of the night. This is not just my fond hope; it’s the hyperlocal weather forecast for this portion of my street taken straight off the face of my smart phone. We’ve come a long way, it would seem, from squinting up at the sky and asking the nearest farmer. . . . [more]

I recently came across some cartoons about Supreme Court advocacy that I’d done up a number of years ago—and since The Friday Fillip is a bully pulpit of sorts, and since nothing out there has particularly caught my attention this week, I make so bold as to impose them on you. (Funny how the last one is no longer funny.)

All of which is respectfully inflicted…

. . . [more]

The great museums of the world are putting their riches online — at least, so many of them as can be represented by photographs or digital copies. If the internet was always a Wunderkamer, it is now almost insanely rich with representations of beautiful and potent objects. Of course, the map is not the territory — and neither does a photograph of a great work of art pack anything like the emotional punch of the work in the flesh, so to speak. That said, it’s still wonderful to roam through the riches of the Rijksmuseum, for example, which . . . [more]

What might Sardinian pastoral songs, Chinese oolong tea, and Moore Town Jamaica have in common?

The answer’s something of a cheat, because it’s: the United Nations, and more specifically, UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Back in 2003 the Conference of UNESCO approved the text of a Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage which came into force in 2006. The aim is to identify and to some extent work to preserve unique aspects of a nation’s or a region’s received culture — intangible heritage, which:

includes traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to

There’s a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous. Often it’s simply a matter of stepping outside an idea and looking back: to take an example, hockey — or sex, if you’d prefer that — is both an exciting target for one’s passion and a profoundly silly way for grownups to disport themselves.

I feel that way to some extent about flying. I’ve been doing it for what seems to be to be a long long time, from the days of partly pressurized DC-3s, though Super G Constellations, Vickers Viscounts and Boeing 707s, on to the airliners of today. . . . [more]

We are a dull lot, I fear. Look around this winter and see what people are wearing. Chances are good, in cities at least, that whatever the shape or style of coat, it’s a dark colour and likeliest of all to be black. What is that about? Winter all by itself leaches colour from the environment, and though a good greyscale can be lovely in the right hands, there’s no need for us to go along with winter’s plan of severity.

Wouldn’t it be more fun — dare I say, exciting — to walk down a winter street and feast . . . [more]

When my voice broke it sort of didn’t. I’d been hoping for one of those giant stomach-flipping plunges you’d get at the county fair’s Turbo Drop, where at the end I’d step out of the chrysalis as a basso profundo — or even (just) a plain old baritone. The universe has a peculiar sense of humour, of course, and so I emerged as a pretty decent first tenor, which meant I actually had to use this high singing voice — and make the first of a number of emendations in my definition of masculinity.^*

Voice. Hearing. Say what . . . [more]

Having just enjoyed a challenging ice storm, I’m full of appreciation for Twitter and the role it plays in emergencies (and in daily life, which is a form of chronic, sub-clinical emergency, surely): what’s going on; what’s wanted, not wanted; what’s likely to happen in the immediate future — this is useful information.

But Twitter has a lighter side, because some people emit a steady stream of jokes; and some of the time these joke are pretty good, certainly good enough for a quick yuk or quiet smile, which are things not to be frowned on in the course of . . . [more]

In a day’s time—at 12:11 p.m where I am, to be exact—it’ll be all downhill for the next six months, as we glide with increasing speed into the light. We’ve done it. We’ve survived the shrinking of the day for yet another year. Time now to begin the inhale, as it were.

I don’t know about you, but as far as I’m concerned the business of burning off the day at both ends leaves me with the desire to be elsewhere, preferably closer to the equator. And though I buck myself up with the “downhill” analogy, I know that . . . [more]

There are things we can control (we think), and things we cannot. Most natural phenomena, big and small, fall into the latter category — which is to say damn near everything that happens. Sensibly, we avoid the dangerous much of the time and try to adapt when we can’t run away far enough. Ice age coming? Oh bother! That means up stakes, heavy coats, and a few millennia of wandering. That sort of thing. But, as a moment’s thought will confirm, our record of staying out the way of “bad” natural phenomena is, well, less than stellar. We build cities . . . [more]

Mumbling covers a lot of sins. When you’re abashed or ill-prepared or simply your usual fifteen minutes away from l’esprit d’escalier, mumbling could be the way to go. Broca’s area has lost contact with ground control, yet utterance is obligatory: dive! dive! dive! And from somewhere deep in the reptilian part of your think gel come noises that sound so close to speech that some of the people some of the time can be fooled.

Lawyers don’t get to mumble much, though. For one thing, it doesn’t work very well in print (which is not to say it’s impossible) . . . [more]