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One of the most common questions I’ve been asked about living in Macedonia was how I coped with everything being written in Cyrillic. Well, actually, more often that not. people asked me about things being written in Russian, or complained, when I wrote place names in the local language in email or IM, that they [...]

After my difficulties last week with Californian hotels, today I had similar problems confirming a booking reference by telephone in Estonia. Again, there was considerable confusion as every time I said ‘N’, they heard ‘M’. Then, when I got them to understand ‘N’, they thought I was offering that as the next character. We tried [...]

As well as posting about things I do, I’m also going to be posting about things I’ve learned.
I’ve ranted here before about the deficiencies in my education, and much as I keep promising myself that I’ll do an A-level in History or Literature or Art History or some such, I just never get around to [...]

There are many sites on the internet carrying the lyrics to Lou Reed and John Cale’s “Song for Drella” album. Interestingly it seems that the vast majority of them are wrong.
There’s a wonderful couplet in “Faces in Names”: People who want to meet the name I have / Are always disappointed in me. But almost [...]

This morning we were flicking through some 1923 issues of The Magnet, marvelling at their “Wireless Dictionary for Boys”, and all the ads for stopping blushing and stammering, curing baldness and growing two to five inches.
We were also rather perturbed to discover a ad for postage stamps offering example stamps from several countries we’d never [...]

Students from the University of Plymouth managed to get a grant of £2000 from the Arts Council to test the hypothesis that an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite amount of time could reproduce the works of Shakespeare.
However, they seemed to lack the resources to attain an infinite supply of monkeys, and with a [...]

I’ve recently starting playing Boggle semi-regularly. I’ve always enjoyed it, but now I’m playing it with people who are much more competitive.
While I was in Boston, I also read Word Freak, a rather scary insight into the world of professional Scrabble.
The combination of these two paragraphs have led me to need to know [...]

I should mention that, for the first time in my life, I managed to go into the Ladies bathroom to relieve myself. You see, of all the words I looked up and learned before I set foot here, I forgot “Man” and “Woman”. I now know that Damen is not German for “men”.
What Casey neglects [...]

Stupid educationists have invented for the educational process the profoundly inadequate term “knowledge transfer”, suggesting a uni-directional stream of knowledge towards an accumulating recipient, who becomes monotonically more knowledgeable. I consider it a caricature at best. The trouble is that it may have stuck in some of your minds, thereby creating an extra barrier for [...]

A few days ago I brought a stack of old issues of ‘Look And Learn’ into the office, so that Marc could share in my happy reminiscing of the days when children’s magazines were filled with 1000+ word articles on interesting subjects. And we got to wondering just why there’s nothing like this available today. [...]

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