I have a friend who knows a good deal about the history of photography who revealed to me that around 1910s the Kodak book of photographic papers had 120 listed papers but by the 1980s when photography had left the preserve of the few and become a mass market experience the number had gone down…
Choose Your Mafia
I think we all tend to join or make groups. Mostly we view them as benign and for many of us membership is as open as buying a house in the neighborhood, joining a club or graduating from a school or University. For all of us the membership is selective though, limited to a certain…
How To Think
While I am sure that brain research will revolutionize our understanding of ourselves during the course of this century I presume to predict one of its key findings will be the ways in which we are taught to think, that stay with us for our whole lives and become almost second nature. Because as children…
Running Without Satire
There are those who think Candide is a huge satire poking fun at writers and society at one and the same time. Which, seeing as most great writers have been somehow outside mainstream society, is quite an interesting conceit and once which Voltaire is easily capable of managing. Gulliver’s Travels has long been the bane…
Times Don’t Change
When I was last in Mumbai it was Bombay, and there were a lot of beggars on the streets. Not only did they flock around Westerners and the rich when they walked in the streets it was noticeable how they haunted the traffic lights and swarmed out when they were red and the cars stopped,…
Publishing On Demand
Having been part of the new wave of self-publishing for over a year now, and run the gamut of marketing techniques, joined about every social networking site I thought might be sensible and done a certain amount of work purely for the number crunching than for the direct relevance, I have realised there is one…
Mumbai
I recently had the pleasure to sit in the Willingdon Club with relatives by a golf course on a balmy evening outdoors in the hot month of may in Mumbai. The club was built by the British and it is based on the clubs you find in London. I was told of an even more…
The People . . .
. . . over at Galaxy Zoo have some six hundred suggestions from me on various galaxies and whether they show rings, are merging with each other and so forth as part of an international effort to have amateurs be part of the screening process. I haven’t been there much this year but got a…
Lying Is An Art
There is a long discussion going on at Linked-In, The economist group about an article on lying in which the demarcation line seems to be drawn by many people that lying is bad, telling the truth good and we always have a choice which to choose. Indeed I now read human beings do not need…
Blueskin The Cat: The Opening
Blueskin wasn’t bothered by thoughts of an after-life. He couldn’t spell reincarnation and hadn’t even heard of India where the people believed in such things. What did bother him for a moment was the awful memory of being strangled to death in a hanging and the loss of his beautiful blue waistcoat with the pearl…