Assistant Village Idiot

Which is why I'm not a boxing judge. When you are a fan, looking mostly at the punches and probably rooting for one guy over another, yo...

 I said to myself I couldn't remember the second verse. This turned out not to be a big problem.  The tune is reminiscent of "Frost...

There has been long suspicion that the variant use of "am" in Black English is a minstrel show fabrication that was never actually...

Anthropology Has a Truth Problem  Len Gutkin at the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Henrich's critique of his own discipline. ...

 The Biblical Censuses are Correct Demographic Records , by Lyman Stone What went wrong was people trying to fix them because they thought t...

 We are having a discussion.  Mine is the minority opinion - against librarians. 

 In Praise of Obsessive Men , by Rosemary Hopcroft at Aporia.   It is a good summary of one side of this discussion about autism. As it is t...

 David Foster put this up during my trip, but it got buried in my notes.  Sorry to be late. The French Army in 1940 and the CDC in 2021 ,  (...

We expect the attractive balance of the Renaissance and even slavish symmetry post Sir Christopher Wren* in our architecture and are surpris...

As you can see from the second photo, the sandstone of Orkney looks like it could practically be split with few hands and put into place for...

This WSJ article is making the rounds, so most of you might have seen it, but I wanted to make sure it got noticed. Boomer Christianity is D...

Just to keep the A capella going. I swear the whole country can sing.    

Strong and solid.  I didn't know this version existed  

Orkney is one of the few places where any knobbed balls have been found in situ.  None of the theories of what they were used for has been ...

Skaill House was already the seat of earls and bishops of Orkney (Some Graham and Watts Lairds, mostly) with some small archaeological impo...

In Scotland, no one pays much attention to Orkney. It has only 22,000 people across the whole chain of islands.  It has almost 200,000 sheep...

I had never heard of it, but recognised the name once the history was given. This is a land value tax arrangement that seems to work well in...

I go to my spam folder to make sure no really mail has ended up there, and always marvel at the random names that are attached: Delilah Oaxa...

 This is the Hudson Bay explorer John Rae's tomb at St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, Orkney  Looks like his admirers gave him about at f...

The main shopping street in Stromness, second-largest town in Orkney, is called Victoria Street on GPS but has a strange history. It was not...

I don't think this is Bernard's best writing, but he does cram a lot of information about the real Arthur (and the denial of the rea...