Safire wrote a set of famous rules. I had seen them before without his name attached, and now I propose them to you with proper accreditation[1]:

William Safire’s Rules for Writers:

• Remember to never split an infinitive.
• The passive voice should never be used.
• Do not put statements in the negative form.
• Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
• Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
• If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
• A writer must not shift your point of view.
• And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
• Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
• Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
• Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
• If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
• Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
• Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
• Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
• Always pick on the correct idiom.
• The adverb always follows the verb.
• Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.

[1] http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/research/groups/protein/pert/safire.rules.html

“We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. They come at a time of life when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent … ”

– William James, “The Ph.D. Octopus”, 1903

Found on Philip Greenspun’s home page. He’s also the author of Greenspun’s Tenth Rule of Programming:

“Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.”

The Pharyngula blog is a source of many interesting arguments and anecdotes about how life is in America for the godless. The main author there was expelled from the line by a cop/mall cop/guy with a badge pretending to be a cop. It’s worth reading the article though – there’s a punchline to the whole story that’s even funnier than decrying a conspiracy to deprive people of knowledge and then ejecting opponents.

If you have any interest in tech or gadgetry, I recommend you keep up on CES. crunchgear is a good place to start.

Thanks to everyone who go in touch, a random assortment of you will be receiving queries :)

What happened next is related in the first 31 pages of ‘‘Character Makes a Difference.’’ This is Huckabee’s ‘‘Profiles in Courage’’ (if J.F.K. had been writing autobiography). He gives the book to reporters as a testament to his skill at crisis management. The crisis in question took place on July 15, 1996. Governor Tucker was supposed to resign, and Huckabee was scheduled to be sworn in at 2 p.m. But at 1:55, Tucker called to say that he had changed his mind. He wasn’t quitting.

This was ‘‘arguably the greatest constitutional crisis in Arkansas history,’’ Huckabee writes, as though his state never seceded from the Union or had its capital’s high school forcibly integrated by the 101st Airborne.

In the course of reading his biography, I read about the town of Arkadelphia, named for Arkansas and Philadelphia. Another example is Dalark (Dallas-Arkansas), and Texarkana, though that’s part of a conurbation with a Texan Town.

It brings to mind Calexico and Mexicali in California.

Are there any other interesting town names out there that I have missed?

Now I really need to meet Robert Scoble:

Note to self: figure out a way to run something like Le Web 3 in Ireland. I could be the Irish Loic Lemeur, I just need charisma, money and investors.

Only one school outside Ireland offers the Leaving Certificate exam to their students. Since 1997, students at the ISM international school in Tripoli, Libya take the Leaving Cert, with Arabic being substituted for Irish. The School’s principal said, “We have students from 42 countries studying at our school; the Irish Leaving Certificate programme offered us the kind of academic standard and subject spread that we were looking for”.

[Wikipedia]

I found the website: here are the only international Leaving Cert Students.

I am completely fascinate by the idea that there is a school out there doing the Leaving. There’s no obvious Irish tie either, no sign of Christian Brothers or anything. How mysterious.

Valleywag spent ages trying to track him down, but ultimately it was Brad Stone at the NY Times that broke Forbes’s Senior Editor Dan Lyons as the Fake Steve. Interestingly, despite having been revealed, the appeal of Fake Steve doesn’t seem to have diminished. It turns out that Dan Lyons is a Very Funny Man and he hits the right level of humour in his attitude to the whole event.

I will be getting a copy of Option$ as soon as I am done with my current two books. I think it might go nicely with Stephen Colbert’s Book. Why not a fake CEO to go with a Real Presidential candidate?