Forgotten Heroes #7 – Boris the Butt Brush

Forgotten Heroes #7 – Boris the Butt Brush

Nigel explains how the Roman precursor to our modern toilet brush, the xylospongium, gave us our grilled meat on a stick, our modern kebabs…and then he concludes with an original Parthian recipe. The other day, while fulminating on the algorithmic vacuity of Facebook,...
Rowing with Imagination – On Xenophon

Rowing with Imagination – On Xenophon

Nigel writes an encomium for the Cost of Glory… Twenty minutes on the rowing machine and the display will dutifully say I have rowed 3.7 kilometres. But that is not really where I am. In my mind, memories merge. I am rowing from Miletus on the Maeander to...
Ramblings #8 – Look Back and Learn

Ramblings #8 – Look Back and Learn

Nigel writes on the irony of hindsight, and how looking back is the only way we ever really learn.   “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” – George Eliot, Middlemarch It is a long drive to Ottawa, and one that I...
Irony #2 – The Virtue of the Ironist

Irony #2 – The Virtue of the Ironist

Irony and the human condition: Peter Scotchmer on why double vision matters more than ever. “…the ironist is caught in a boundary zone between two opposed and mutually exclusive perspectives… between the necessity to believe in the world as it ought to be, and the...