Are there any Dabblers who have personal acquaintance with the reality checkpoint unearthed in today's unusual wikipedia article? Reality Checkpoint is the name given to a large lamp-post in the middle of Parker's Piece, Cambridge, England, located at the intersection of the park's diagonal paths. The name comes from an unofficial ... Read More...
Month: January 2014
Frank makes a ... well, a thing... Cardboard Adam stands hand in hand with cardboard Eve in front of a cardboard tree around which is twined a serpent of plasticine. Plasticine, too, are the fruits which hang from the cardboard branches of the tree. In truth, cardboard Adam and cardboard Eve ... Read More...
Douglas Dalrymple on one of the best things about children: their books.... One of the richer returns of parenthood is the welcome excuse to reacquaint oneself with children’s books. There are the old crowd-pleasers, of course, likeAlice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Kipling’s Just So Stories, Dr Seuss, Curious George, Madeline, Babar and all the wonderful little books ... Read More...
Rita celebrates an Art Deco gem in an unlikely location... Where would you expect to find the venerable American Film Institute’s movie theater? There is one in Los Angeles of course, on the non-profit organization’s eight-acre campus in the Hollywood hills. You might expect their second theater to be in New ... Read More...
Go on a diet in January? Terrible idea! Jassy serves up a winter treat... The trouble with having curly hair is that I wake up most mornings looking like a bichon frisé that’s licked a socket. I have a halo of brambles that neither comb, mousse or hairspray can control. This Medusan tangle is ... Read More...
“Happy New Year!” we say to one another, but do we say it in optimistic expectation or in fearful hopes: beseeching Fate that 2014 is not the year when one’s ordained calamity strikes? A bit of both, but increasingly the latter as we accumulate more new years, I suppose. We ... Read More...
Mahlerman starts 2014 in glorious fashion with the 'rebirth' of music in Venice... The Renaissance period, in art, literature and music is generally said, for convenience, to begin around 1400 and pass into the Baroque two hundred years later; and though this 'rebirth' may be true of painting and sculpture - ... Read More...
The first Wikiworm of 2014 gets the year started with a wikipedia article about some hard-rockin' crimes against language... A metal umlaut (also known as röck döts) is a gratuitously or decoratively used accent over letters in the names of hard rock or heavy metal bands. Among English speakers, the use ... Read More...
We are honoured once again to publish Old Key's Almanacke, a series of unerringly accurate (as you will see from the last edition) predictions for the coming twelvemonth... January : Police swoop on all living octogenarian light entertainers not yet arrested under Operation Yewtree. February : Twitcher spots corncrake through binoculars. March : ... Read More...
Brisbane-based journalist Ben Atherton reveals how Dylan Thomas led him astray... Back in the good old days, when I was trying to get my first job on newspapers, a standard interview question was: "Why do you want to become a journalist?". The standard answer always began with platitudes about an "enjoyment" of ... Read More...
