Paralipomena (1)

Aha!
At last I found out why this blog was not coming up. The “theme” or template that it was using has been deleted. Pesky that no-one told me despite various enquiries. I had to figure it out myself by fiddling around.
While this blog was off air, however, I got impatient and transferred [...]

[Read more →]

Does Sir Alan Ayckbourn actually enjoy the theatre? The fact is, the great man of the British stage, the first playwright to be knighted after Terence Rattigan, can’t stand most of it. It makes him cringe. “It’s a love-hate thing,” he says. “I love that moment when a show is firing on all cylinders in [...]

[Read more →]

Art deco was a strange phenomenon. In the grand history of 20th-century art, it has generally been assigned a fairly lowly place. None of its leading figures are very famous, in the way that Picasso or Jackson Pollock are famous. It produced no magisterial paintings. And yet art deco represents something important that we lack [...]

[Read more →]

Some say that its 45 mysterious symbols are the words of a 4,000-year-old poem, or perhaps a sacred text. Others contest that they are a magical inscription, a piece of ancient music or the world’s oldest example of punctuation.
But now an American scholar believes that the markings on the Phaistos Disc, one of archaeology’s [...]

[Read more →]

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy: Queen was ‘exquisite’ and I love the eccentric British
By Andrew Pierce
Last Updated: 9:06PM BST 11/07/2008
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, France’s First Lady, has described for the first time her admiration for the eccentric British and the “exquisite” Queen who spoke perfect French on her State visit to Britain.
In an interview to promote her new album Mrs [...]

[Read more →]

By Paola Totaro
The gates outside Buckingham Palace are a delightful place to sit and people-watch. In summer and winter, in the rain or bright sunshine, tourists climb the railings like ivy over a stone wall. Young and old, monarchists and not, they clamber and peek and crane, cameras at the ready, just in case.
Last week, [...]

[Read more →]

By TAMAR SNYDER
People often compare dating to interviewing for a job. In the Orthodox Jewish world, this notion is taken almost literally.
Upon returning from post-high-school studies in Israel, young Orthodox women (such as myself) meet with recruiters, commonly known as shadchanim (matchmakers). After determining whether the young woman wishes to marry a “learner” (a man [...]

[Read more →]

Poor farming practices in the 3rd world is an old, old story - which is why most agricultural production for export is in the developed world — though China is learning fast. Good to see that someone is trying to help the African farmers but moving the crop to areas [...]

[Read more →]

On Wed., July 2, 2008, an Arab started trying to kill people on a very packed busy street in Jerusalem with his work vehicle, a caterpillar type of huge bulldozer. He just drove it onto the adjacent packed street and started trying to crush cars. One of the first cars he attacked was ours. In [...]

[Read more →]

Florida Congressman John Mica has a radical idea: He wants to develop high-speed rail service between New York and Washington, D.C.
We know what you’re thinking – isn’t there already a high-speed train between New York and Washington? Unfortunately, nobody who’s taken the Amtrak Acela train would suffer from this confusion. The Acela service, much hyped [...]

[Read more →]