and speaking of The Onion

This is a real one from them:

American People Hire High-Powered Lobbyist To Push Interests In Congress

That probably makes it about 3-4 years until this really happens. (It’ll be sort of like the position of Tribune in ancient Rome.)

life imitates The Onion again

This is a serious issue, of course, so I don’t say it as a joke, but just as another reminder of how life imitates The Onion so often. (They didn’t have an actual article like this as far a I know, but they easily might have.)

HIV-positive muppet to star in Nigeria’s ‘Sesame Street’

more Heidegger available

This newly released book is only 214 pages, and covers the themes of language and art, joined together in a single volume:

Zum Wesen der Sprache und Zur Frage nach der Kunst

Towards Speculative Realism may already exist

According to the zerO Books database, the first batch of 200 copies is due at the publisher’s office on October 8, so it is likely that physical copies of the book do already exist.

Taine on the Saxons

I have no time to read anything at the moment, but I happened to pick up our library’s old beaten 1900 edition (some of the pages are still uncut) of Hippolyte Taine’s History of English Literature, and have found it hard to put down.

Especially entertaining are his blunt moments, such as the following remark about Norman-Saxon relations in England:

“In a century and a half [the Normans] were so far cultivated as to find the Saxons ‘unlettered and rude.’ That was the excuse they made for banishing them from the abbeys and all valuable ecclesiastical offices. And, in fact, this excuse was rational, for they instinctively hated gross stupidity.”

new language discovered

In INDIA. Right under our noses, all this time.

“The project reports that a language becomes extinct every two weeks. By 2100, it is estimated that more than half of the 6,910 languages spoken on earth will vanish.”

holiday in Egypt

Along with being the 14th birthday of my eldest nephew, today is a national holiday in Egypt: Armed Forces Day. The occasion for the memorial, of course, is the October 1973 War.

It’s nice to have a stay-at-home weekday, for once.

two days?

Whoa, did I really go two full days with no new posts? I didn’t realize I was that busy, but our Presidential finalists have been on campus and we’ve been getting to know them all. Nice group.