Wednesday, Feb 8th 2012
Every June, the schoolchildren of the Greater Manchester area nominate and vote for their Lollipop Lady of the Year. Lollipop Ladies are a British institution, known abroad variously as Crossing Guards, School Crossing Supervisors, Crossing Patrol Operatives, Pediatric Pedestrian Transverse Street Enablers, Lollipop Men (in Muslim countries), and, in France, as Les Otaries Effrayantes. We [...]
Once upon a time, superstitions and rituals were the sole preserve of reactionaries, professional athletes, the alienated, children, and those suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. These days, however, it seems like everyone is aware of how little control they have over their lives and consequently feels the need to propitiate the gods of Fate and Fortune [...]
Losing weight doesn’t have to be a major undertaking, providing you’re willing to make the necessary tweaks to your everyday habits that mean the difference between oh-boy! and o-bese. The U.S. National Institutes of Health report that a net loss of a mere 231 calories every day for a month is enough to guarantee a [...]
It was a source of constant irritation to Joyce that Sean O’Casey had a bridge named after him when no writer had done more to integrate north and south sides of the Liffey into a cohesive and coherent lifeworld than Joyce had. Perhaps his irritation went deeper than that, though. After all, it was Casey [...]
Westland Row
The birthplace of the playwright and essayist Oscar Wilde, Westland Row is now, as you can see, much grubbier than it was in Bloom’s time, both graffitoed and vandalized. Built in 1776 by Jacob Epstein, it now appears to be the permanent home of unkempt students from Trinity College who congregate in indolent [...]
In honour of Ireland’s first flâneur après la lettre, Leopold Bloom, members of the Dublin Psychogeographical Society took it upon themselves this year to re-create his dérive, as described in James Joyce’s remarkable novel Ulysses, and in our usual spirit of bloody-mindedness, to do it in Paris, source originaire de [...]
A baker’s dozen of little-known facts about those giants of light entertainment The Muppets.
1: The original names for Statler and Waldorf were Heckler and Cock
2: The word “Muppet” has a Victorian origin. It was coined to refer to “musical pets” such as singing canaries, piano-playing dogs, and catskull maracas.
3: The gobbledygook-spouting, weird-looking cook [...]
Ouija Boards are brilliant. Some people think that they are not brilliant, but they are wrong. What a Ouija Board is, is a special type of wooden board with writing on it that students use to roll spliffs on. However, they have many other uses beyond the obvious: They can also be used by teenagers [...]
CANTON GLE SERIES HOME THEATER SPEAKER SYSTEM ($3,046)
As tested, this system comprised a pair of GLE 490 floor-standing towers, a GLE 455 center speaker, a pair of GLE 420 surrounds, and an AS 85 SC powered subwoofer. The 1-inch soft-dome tweeter found in all the speakers employs a fabric dome, but this new-and-improved version also [...]
