More democracy (and chess)

Author Tim Krabbe (there’s an accent on the e, but I can’t get it to show up) has a chess site called Chess Curiosities. In his Open Chess Diary (anyone interested in chess who hasn’t seen it before should go all the way back to the beginning) notes that at his website, the Grand Ayatollah [...]

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FOR SALE: cushy job – cigarettes & coffee essential

There's been an interesting story circulating the Greek blogs the past couple of days, and I was going to write about it here in English, but I've discovered that Academia Nervosa and Histologion have already done a fine job of it, so I'll direct you to them in a minute.
For those of you unfamiliar with [...]

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Democracy is coming

Does anyone remember wanting to puke during that Kodak moment when Safia Taleb al-Suhail, leader of the Iraqi Women’s Political Council, proudly held up her ink-stained finger, after Bush’s State of the Union address?
Well, try to keep your gorge from rising when you read how the times are a-changing for women in Iraq, at Baghdad [...]

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Conflict of Style

In university I barely read novels. I only read what I studied, and I believed only poetry could stand up to the intensive sort of study I went in for. I could find more to say about a single page of poetry than I could about an entire novel.
Ironically, when I went to university I [...]

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Their are two things wrong in this blog title

Last year I read an interesting novel by Carlo Frabetti called Los jardines cifrados. I heard the following excerpt (which opens the book) read on the radio late one night,* and bought the book a few days later.
The book is not available in English. I have translated the excerpt from the Greek. I found it [...]

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