It’s been a long time since I last wrote an “Angry, of Richmond” letter to a newspaper–I suppose I never really quite got over The Independent‘s not publishing an elegant missal I’d written a while back about George Bush. On Friday 13th June, however, I may have been prompted to write as much by the […]
Read moreYes, indeed, on this day we in England commemorate the matyrdom, on 23rd April 303, of the Anatolian- or Syrian-born Hellenophone patron saint of Palestine. And of Ethiopia. And, come to that, of Georgia (possibly named after the saint), Aragon, Catalonia, Greece, Portugal, and Russia, as well as of the cities of Amersfoort, Beirut (where […]
Read moreGulp …! Yes, decided at last to upgrade from Sabayon 3.3 to 3.5 Loop1 and, at the same time, to take the plunge with the new Entropy Binary Package Manager. Had to run revdep-rebuild afterwards to repair some broken dependencies; but otherwise went smoothly. Having, over the years and on various machines, used Redhat (starting […]
Read moreI’m feeling mischievous today. I hope you’ll forgive me (though I’m flattered to know that in the eyes and prejudices of many I can never be forgiven). I was impressed, at last Friday evening’s “Slavery & the Natural World” event at the Natural History Museum, by the consistent use by museum staff of the term […]
Read moreWe went, yesterday evening, to a fascinating and, in many ways, ground-breaking event in the Darwin Centre of the Natural History Museum. Structured as an informal 30 minute lecture, an hour of interactive workshop, and follow-up 40 minute group discussion, ‘Slavery & the Natural World‘ is part of the Natural History Museum’s commemoration of the […]
Read moreYesterday we were down in Portsmouth for the Remembrance Day service at which my father (pictured right) was laying a wreath on behalf of the Italy Star Association. This was (so far as I recall) the first Remembrance Sunday service I have ever attended, but of course could not on this occasion have missed my […]
Read moreLost for an appropriate title for this piece, I made up this title word. (Go on, dig out your Classical Greek dictionaries.) As you’ll understand from what follows, its novelty affords me for the time being a precarious sense of security. And what follows is writeable not because it contingently emerges from a personal incident […]
Read more[I’m still in the middle of writing this one … but feel free to read the draft below. A final revised version will find its way into my ICHIM 2007 conference paper.] There’s been some lively discussion in the steve.museum mailing list over the past week on the subject of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ tagging of […]
Read moreI missed this on my birthday, 28th May, but the coincidence of date demands that I say a few words about it now. I’ve been reading the occasional news item over the past year or so regarding creationist Ken Ham’s $27 million Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which finally opened its doors to the public […]
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