The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

They made a movie called Don John? At last! Someone else read the Chesterton poem and thought it was as awesome as I did, and wanted to mak...

The surest sign cementing my status as a curmudgeon is my annoyance at the creeping spread of TV screens into places that didn't have th...

So Eugene Fama was finally awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, along with Lars Hansen and Robert Shiller. All of them are thoroughly deser...

File this one under “it’s probably still a bad idea, but it’s not clear exactly why”. The idea of a hedge is to take steps that are (t...

The massive fire engine drove past me down the narrow street, sirens wailing, and turned down towards the parking lot next to the beach. ...

Two days ago, the Feds finally shut down the  Silk Road , the online marketplace for drugs, guns, hitmen and other miscellaneous highly ill...

Apparently the USDA website is shut down  due to the government funding crisis. This prompts two responses from me: 1. Oh no! How will w...

In the world of male hairstyles, hair length functions something like a cross between mercury poisoning and a syphilis infection. Initially ...

From 30,000 feet in the air, the early evening displays a curious inversion of light. The ground beneath me is a dark purplish grey. I somet...

I was having a discussion with Athenios the other day about the Byzantine Empire. Apparently this is a big part of the curriculum at Greek s...

"Better to live under one tyrant a thousand miles away, than a thousand tyrants one mile away." - Daniel Bliss

To paraphrase England's greatest prime minister , commercial partners, like nations, have no permanent allies, only permanent interests...

1.  Just $10? Why not $50? Now THAT'S a living wage! It's free, after all. 2. Physicists discover that nominal interest rates are...

From a reddit post recently: Just remember, ignorance of the EU's 26,911 word missive on the sale of cabbage is no excuse! David F...

Steve Sailer links to this fantastic New Yorker comic: Ouch! Please report to the burn unit of the hopsital! This hits so many outrage...

(Some background - the article that started it all ) "There has been a recent furor over the fact that our CTO, Pax Dickinson, made s...

In January 1936, King George V was in seriously declining health. He had suffered from pleurisy and pulmonary disease for a number of years,...

Specifically, the obituaries. The 'it' here is The Economist. Their obituary section, on the last page of the magazine, is far an...

"Libya". So, we want to topple a nasty secular dictator we know, who is locked in a struggle with Al Qaeda-linked terrorist ...

When historians of the future are writing the epitaph for the west, I imagine that one of the characteristics that will strike them about th...

A sad but sweet comic from SMBC . Brave Zack Weiner! That was drawing! Good alike at grave and gay!

Without drinking it, obviously. This is continuing in the 'news you can use' category, among the trivialities that have been occup...

If confronted with an exam question of the following form: "Two friends are having a discussion. Simon say that [ABC]. Sally, on the ...

I have been rather tardy with this particular web diary of late. As usual, a lack of posts either means that my life has gotten a lot less f...

As far as I can hotel, there are only two possible prices for services at a hotel: a) 5 times market price, or b) Free. And that's...

How strange it is to be in the twilight of one's youth! To gaze around and reflect on the set of choices you made (whether deliberatel...

The age old question, as most readers of this august diary will know, is the following: Do you know what it takes to sell real estate? ...

" Because they enjoy it. Why does anyone do anything? "

Singapore is often held up as a kind of model reactionary state among the nations in existence today. It has incredibly low crime rates, low...

So much has been said on the Trayvon Martin case already. It feels a little bit like World War I – when you try to explain that France is fi...

If you look across the countries of the world, it is a reliable trend that any country featuring the word ‘Democratic’ in its name is both ...

-One of the classic experiments in psychology to indicate overconfidence is to ask people to self-rate their driving ability. Nearly everybo...

As a tribute to the dying hours of the National Holiday over here, everyone who hasn't yet read it should read the great Thomas Hutchins...

So the Military in Egypt decided they'd had enough of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government and removed them in a co...