confused of calcutta

Aristology: The science of cooking and dining. Abjured, even denigrated, by Nero Wolfe, on the basis that both cooking and dining are arts, not sciences. Now more commonly defined as both an art and a science, covering the preparation, cooking, presentation and eating of food.
Zeuglodont: A type of carnivorous whale. Now extinct. Also referred to [...]

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Take a look at this:

A mashup involving Google Earth, local time and Santa Claus. So that you can show your children precisely where Santa is at a given time. [The rest of the year, Santa lives at the North Pole, located just off 1 Infinite Loop, where his elves make iPhones, iPods and Macs].
My thanks [...]

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I nearly did myself an injury when I saw this:

Randall Munroe is a truly gifted individual. We need to knight him. Or something.
So make a New Year’s resolution you’ll actually keep to. Read xkcd every day. You won’t regret it.
My thanks to Dawn Foster for tweeting it to my attention. [By the way, Dawn, I'm [...]

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I can’t help smiling at the news that there are likely to be three separate versions of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in the charts shortly, including two in the top three:

The Alexandra Burke version, the X Factor winner’s single (likely to be No 1)
The Jeff Buckley version, the one that people my age think is the [...]

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Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief:
Polonius, Hamlet, Act II Scene II
I had the good fortune to see the recent RSC production of Hamlet last night. And I really enjoyed it. When I looked around the theatre, there were many youngsters about, including a few [...]

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As a family, we love fancy dress parties. My son’s at one right now; we go to at least one a year; if there isn’t one to go to, then we try and host one. I guess it’s something they put in the water where we live.
We like wacky themes. For example, when my wife [...]

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When I was around ten years old, my father introduced me to this poem:

It was an inflection point for me. Until then, I had always thought of poets as creative people who expressed themselves in verse when caught by the muse; as artists who penned off heaps of poems in seconds flat as and when [...]

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I blame Christopher Carfi for this post. It was he who tweeted:
Wasilla’s all I saw
If that was not enough, he went further: he called it a Palin-drome.
Which had me on the verge of snorting green tea out my nostrils in ways God never intended nostrils to be used. Thank you Chris.
You know something? I had [...]

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Remember Happy Days? Here’s a video that’s worth seeing (if you haven’t already), courtesy of Funny Or Die, which is a site worth bookmarking. Ron Howard making an appearance with Henry Winkler, the Fonz himself. Depending on your political persuasion, you’re going to love it or hate it. The good thing about such viral approaches [...]

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Saw this over at John M Willis’s blog:

I couldn’t help but smile. It reminded me of something I heard nearly thirty years ago, when I worked at Burroughs Corporation. One of our customers, Smiths Industries, had a mainframe that was finally ready for that great computer graveyard in the sky. Nobody had really expected that [...]

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