Ooh, look: a rather lovely map of the internet, using IP blocks and a clever wavy pattern to keep things comprehensible. xkcd.com is pretty good nerd humour, here’s a selection of other funny strips. I like that last one. Perhaps I’ll try to refer to the web as the “Intertubes” from now on. It has a ring to it.
G. K. Chesterton points out that The Pickwick Papers is Dickens’s one hack book
, because it was actually written to order, on the suggestion of his publisher. It takes about ten chapters for the novel to break out of the constraints of the original brief, during which process you can actually see Dickens learning to be Dickens; you start off in an unfamiliar little place populated by flat characters engaged in somewhat dull interactions, but after while he finds his voice and you’re pulled into the Pickwickian universe.
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Money being so hard to come by, classical musicians today rely almost entirely on the financial support they receive from foundations, the idle rich, no-show jobs at music schools - or Daddy. Because John Q Public has had so little to do with advancing their careers, there is absolutely no incentive for contemporary composers to write music that ordinary people might enjoy. So musicians write music for other musicians. Anyone else, you couldn’t pay them to listen to it.
Not entirely fair. I can think of several* pieces of contemporary classical music that aren’t completely unlistenable tosh, less enjoyable than a performance from a tone deaf chimpanzee with a toy piano.
* Three. No, sorry, I jest. Four.
If this rumour is true, I might actually switch. I’ve been coveting OS X for a while, and I’m a sucker for dinky laptops; a 12″ version with a decent spec would probably swing it for me.