NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Blimey, those flying cetaceans were something else (thanks to Helena, again.)

Stephen Fry: What I wish I’d known when I was 18 from Peter Samuelson on Vimeo.

Thanks to George Murray for posting this on Facebook. Now, get your kids to watch. Insist on it.

Given that God’s existence can’t, according to Pascal, be proven by reason, a person should, he said, wager that He exists. What is there to lose? Hence, during the coming weeks, I’ll be praying for Christopher Hitchens. Wishing him good health as he undergoes treatment for cancer of the esophagus. Apt this praying, I’d say, in light of what Paul Horowitz writes here about Hitchens:

Throughout this narrative, we are alerted to Hitchens’s pursuit of “the Janus-faced mode of life.” As the Roman god of temple doorways, Janus looked both ways and is depicted with two faces in the statuary honoring him. Grabbing the horns of his own enigma, Hitchens observes that the doors of the temple were open in time of war, and war “is a time when the ideas of contradiction and conflict are most naturally regnant,” and that the most intense wars are civil, and the most rending conflicts internal. “What I hope to do now,” he says of the text before us, “is give some idea of what it is like to fight on two fronts at once, to try and keep opposing ideas alive in the same mind, even occasionally to show two faces at the same time.”

(via the incomparable piony) ….relativity can be fun, thanks to Ramamurti Shankar, Yale University. His talk of trains reminds me of Jacob Bronowski’s lucid description of the theory of relativity in The Ascent of Man. Here, thanks to Google and Internet, you can watch the brilliant Bronowski as he talks about how the structure of nature is translated into numbers.  And, more impressively, apropos Newton, Einstein et al, Bronowski’s take on the matter (at around the 33 minute mark).

via Helena Kerzner

Morals of three stories:

1. You must believe that the dots will connect somewhere down the road; this will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the beaten path, and that will make all the difference.

2. Do what you love. Don’t settle for less.

3. Remember that you are going to die, this will help you avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. Have the courage to trust your intuition. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

This from the Globe and Mail:

Several Greater Victoria booksellers confirmed Monday that FBI agents have visited their stores in the past week and asked staff to be on the lookout for 80-year-old James J. (Whitey) Bulger, a known book lover and former Boston mobster with a long list of brutal crimes on his rap sheet.

I’d like to dedicate this advert to my mother (difficult cow, 65) who is responsible for me still being single at 36. Man 36. Single. Held at home by years of subtle emotional abuse and at least 19 fake heart attacks.

7 million is good for me. Most days though I plateau at around 3 million. Any advances? Man with low sperm count (35- that’s my age) seeks woman in no hurry to see the zygotes divide.

Bald, short , fat and ugly male, 53, seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite.

You’re a brunette, 6′, long legs, 25-30, intelligent, articulate and drop dead gorgeous. I, on the other hand, am 4′ 10", have the looks of Hervé Villechaize (Fantasy Island) and carry an odour of wheat. No returns and no refunds.

Bastard, complete and utter. Whatever you do don’t reply, you’ll only regret it.

List your ten favourite albums. I don’t want to compare notes, I just want to know if there’s anything worth keeping when we break up. Practical forward thinking male, 35.

Source: They Call me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books, edited by David Rose (Scribner, 2006).

Unbelievable the number of assholes who drive slowly in the passing lanes here in North America, especially when it allows them to block off all paths past them. This just doesn't happen on the Autobahn. Even when three lanes offer themselves up…no one bloody uses them…no, they jam themselves over on the left…either simply oblivious to how inconsiderate they are…or too 'proud' to drive on the right hand side, so that people like me who like to speed can blast past them without having to slow down.