RJ5000

Ann Marie Kennedy, a resident of Effin in Limerick County, Ireland, complained that Facebook was blocking her from listing her hometown on her profile. She wanted to show her pride in her parish, she said, along with “so many Effin people around the world.” A woman from Bumpass, Virginia, was arrested for smashing a salt bottle over her date’s head while he slept. An inquest confirmed that reggae singer Smiley Culture stabbed himself through the heart.

Three Americans won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that a mysterious dark energy was constantly accelerating the universe’s expansion, which would result in a phenomenon known as the “big rip” that would leave the cosmos covered in ice and completely dark. The universe will be “a very, very large, but very cold and lonely place,” said Charles Blue, spokesman for the American Institute of Physics.

In Old English ‘bleak’ meant ‘shining, white’ and came from the same Germanic root as ‘bleach’.

Don’t abandon me in this exile of mine, which is overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and decorative young ladies.

[B]ecause we must always listen to the language; it is our first sign of the presence of a master’s hand; and when we do that, when we listen, it is because we have first pronounced the words and performed the text, so when we listen we hear, hear ourselves singing the saying, and now we are real readers, we are participating in the making, we are moving the tune along the line, because no one who loves literature can follow these motions, these sentences, half sentences, of William Gaddis, very far without halting and holding up their arms and outcrying hallelujah there is something good in this gosh awful god empty world […] we need to understand this book—enjoy its charm, its wit, its irony, its erudition, its sensuous embodiment—the way we understand a spouse we have lived with and listened to and loved for many years through all their nights. Persons deserving such devotion and instinctual appreciation are rare; rarer still are the works which are worth it.

But no empire lasts forever; even the canniest operator loses their touch eventually, and Murdoch, let’s remember, is the man who bought MySpace.

[…]

The “certainties” and self-evidences of the near-past are unravelling quicker than we can keep up.