The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

Come, dear reader, and gaze into the abyss of what happens to human nature when man can find no purpose to worship higher than himself. Li...

I was in Maryland over the weekend with some family friends. It was hunting season, which my friend and I found out when we went for a walk ...

Google Beatbox .

Tyler Cowen links to this fascinating paper by Edward O'Boyle on the Great Irish famine, in which maybe a million or more people died....

Thus I remember hearing about monkeys, but can't find a source for... If you give a monkey a button that dispenses food when pressed, h...

“[T]he only way to enjoy the great Republic would be to burn one’s standards and warm one’s self at the blaze.” - Pandora True or not, it’s...

I’m not. I’m passable by male standards, and definitely better than some people (The Greek, for instance, who reputedly had to ask his girlf...

I was talking about this story with JS earlier this evening. I was at a Chicago Bulls game a few years ago. The Bulls weren't very good ...

As evidenced by the Recording Industry Association of America: 1. File Lawsuits against everyone. 2. Engage in media bluster in an attem...

It's almost axiomatic that one's own snobberies and differences in taste are crucial marks of aesthetic refinement, whereas everyone...

Vegas also illustrates wonderfully how little of economic growth is driven by actual resources any more, and instead comes from the network ...

See if this pattern sounds familiar: 1. North Korea commits outrageous provocation towards South Korea 2. South Korea warns them very st...

The Weak Law of Casinos is my way of estimating how much the odds of winning a particular game are tilted towards the house. And it is thu...

I spent the weekend in Vegas. A couple of posts on the subject will be forthcoming. As a first pass, Vegas has a totally weird distributio...

I had not heard of Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, before today. I am sure Ron Wyden and I would find much to disagree about in m...

If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you, as Mr Nietzsche sagely observed : This ad, which came up during a House e...

The First: http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Murdered-tourist-looking-for-real-Africa-20101116 Cape Town - The husband of murdered t...

Their description, not mine - but apt nonetheless! http://veryawesomeworld.com/awesomebook/inside.html

Okay, so if you're either, you're probably both, but they're answers to quite different questions.  Why do people from Iran alw...

I am aware of the risk of turning this blog into an all-SMBC-all-the-time affair, but this one was so good I couldn't resist. He also ge...

..is download the free new album by 'Girl Talk', the awesome mashup DJ. I know what you're thinking - "Girl Talk"?!?...

Tim Blair links to this great story in The Sun - two thugs with a bull terrier attempted to pick a fight with three guys in London, but e...

One of the developments I like the most about the internet is the advent of blogs that combine accurate reporting of the news with snarky hu...

Where 'Us' equals 'The Chinese' . Apparently some time in April, 15 per cent of all internet traffic was for a time diverted...

Hippy rock star Neil Young tries to convert 1959 Lincoln Continental into a hybrid, succeeds in burning down warehouse instead . The artic...

I oppose tax increases because they fund a wasteful, value destroying government. I oppose them because they reduce the incentives to work a...

These days, areas predominantly populated by gay people tend to be the cool parts of town (The Castro in San Francisco, Boystown in Chicago,...

From Christopher Hitchens : "Darfur, Zimbabwe, Burma, North Korea, anywhere that the concept of human rights doesn't exist, it...

The funniest gags are rarely fair to their subject matter (and this is no exception), but this is funny and hits the mark. My favourite line...

Scorn not democracy lightly, my friends. It has been so long since most of our countries have had to experience (or even seriously contempl...

Public affairs vex no man, as Dr Johnson observed : BOSWELL. "Perhaps, Sir, I should be the less happy for being in Parliament. I neve...

If a man's height were subject to as much fluctuation as a woman's weight, I wonder if women would still have the reputation of bein...

When people think about rude words, they usually focus on their raw power to cause offense. This tends to prioritise the usual suspects like...

Apparently Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars, two of the biggest poker sites have recently been having a purge of poker bots, according to The ...

In economics, a corner solution is ( roughly speaking ) the solution to an optimization problem that involves being up against a binding co...

Human nature and human motivations are rarely simple. Pithy rhetoric and evocative examples cannot paper over the fact that the same actions...

This lesson in publicity 101 comes from Ryan Maloney , a.k.a. 'Toadfish', a longtime character on the Australian soap opera ' Ne...

Zero Hedge has an interesting post about how the European debt crisis is set to be the next focus of the market. What's well known is...

" Irish Breakfast - it's the whiskey of teas."

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/Orwell-B.htm The title of this post alone ought to be enough convince you (Men of Letters, all) to read this. B...