Is a genre of literature I’m growing to appreciate more and more with time.
It’s surprisingly depressing, though. It seems like the protagonist always dies at the end, and by then I feel like I’m losing a dear friend.
“Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not” is a little more than I can easily do.
Nowadays young people sometimes refer to their seniors, who do not altogether share their tastes, as “squares.” In this they differ from the ancient Romans, who used the word “quadratus”, when applied to a fellow citizen, as a compliment.
Thus Viscount Slim of Burma.
Merry Christmas, what ho, what ho, what ho! (more…)
I give you William Blake: (more…)
This is the time of year for Christmas devotions. This year my thoughts have been on the impulse to serve the needy that we have at Christmas. We don’t have it at Easter. My thoughts have also been on the Christ child. The religious significance of the grown Christ, on the cross and in the garden, is obvious. But what did Christ do for us as a bare baby?
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Even Dark Lords have a soft spot. I don’t know why I find puppies adorable; I just do.
As seen at Marginal Revolution, a study of turning the hearts of the children to their fathers:
An initial study involved 80 undergrads spending five minutes thinking about either their fifteenth century ancestors, their great-grandparents or a recent shopping trip. Afterwards, those students in the two ancestor conditions were more confident about their likely performance in future exams, an effect that seemed to be mediated by their feeling more in control of their lives.
Three further studies showed that thinking or writing about their recent or distant ancestors led students to actually perform better on a range of intelligence tests, including verbal and spatial tasks (in one test, students who thought about their distant ancestors scored an average of 14 out of 16, compared with an average of 10 out of 16 among controls). The ancestor benefit was mediated partly by students attempting more answers – what the researchers called having a ‘promotion orientation’.
“…demeaning and nonfalsifiable.”
His Majesty finds this a refreshing blast of pessimism.
“Kids who leave high school either take up post-secondary education, and enter the most politically engaged space they’re likely to occupy in their entire lives, or they start earning paycheques—a moment at which government policy becomes frighteningly real, as if a monster in a children’s book had suddenly leapt off the page and started devouring the furniture.” (link)
Heh.
Not only will it be like this, it must be like this. (more…)