confused of calcutta

Sitting comfortably? Take a look at this excerpt from what appears to be a manual written maybe sixty years ago:

Do you identify with any of it? Recognise those behaviours from anywhere?
Stay seated. Now take a look at the cover page of the manual in question:

Yup. Simple sabotage, as practised and trained for by the OSS. [...]

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Some of you may have done your time on the “Sharper Image meets I Want One of Those” circuit. I know I have, but largely vicariously so far. I’ve tended to look but not buy, for the most part. There have been exceptions, though: the most recent was a Bauhaus birdhouse I just had to [...]

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[This one is dedicated to Stowe, a kindred spirit (at least in the context of e-mail].
A few decades ago, losing a personal name and address book amounted to a major tragedy. A decade ago, losing a mobile phone (with its cache of remembered numbers) amounted to a minor tragedy.
Now everything’s backed up. Or, to put [...]

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I guess I’m slightly fanatical about music made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There was so much wonderful music made during those days. So I thought I’d try constraining things differently in a pretend Desert Island DIscs selection.
I decided to choose exactly 50 albums from my collection.
Too difficult.
Still too many.
So I decided [...]

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Noticed a cartoon in today’s Wall Street Journal suggesting that with the credit crunch and the stock market slide, we weren’t going to be inundated with credit card applications in the post.
And it made me wonder. Is spam recession proof? Will it fragment? Will I continue to get Nigerian begging letters and pharmaceutical offers but [...]

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Deep Throat: Follow the money.
Bob Woodward: What do you mean? Where?
Deep Throat: Oh, I can’t tell you that.
Bob Woodward: But you could tell me that.
Deep Throat: No, I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm. I’ll keep you in the right direction if I can, but that’s [...]

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I had to read this a second time, just to make sure somebody wasn’t pulling my leg:
The group is accused of erecting a massive structure in the shape of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for the Hindu festival of the Goddess Durga, which celebrates her killing a demon and the victory of good [...]

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You may have noticed that I’ve been pretty quiet of late. In terms of posts per day, this is the quietest month I’ve had since I started blogging. Now when you consider the fact that I had a major heart attack last December and still managed to blog pretty regularly, the emptiness of June 2007 [...]

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[With thanks to Ms Safka, and to Malcolm for alerting me to this story via his post here.]
[An aside: Would you believe Melanie turned 60 earlier this week? Happy belated birthday.]
In a HotNews post earlier today, Steve Jobs opened up (pun intended) with his views on DRM. Well worth a read. For me, the most [...]

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Have you ever seen Adelson’s Illusion?
The squares marked A and B are the same shade of grey.
I won’t spoil it for you by giving you the proof here. Instead, why don’t you go visit the original site and see for yourself? There are a number of really worthwhile illusions there. I first saw it maybe [...]

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