All posts in March 2025

The cute verse is from the site OEDILF.co, where an editorial team and a host of contributors were once busy compiling a complete English dictionary, each word defined by means of a limerick. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of words appeared there before the site somehow disappeared. Limericks are a bit like their even lower-rent siblings, knock-knock…

The universe, it seems, is a one way street, moving temporally from the Big Bang to some uncertain destination in one direction only, from the present to the future and never the other way around. The British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington (that’s he chatting amiably with Albert Einstein, above) memorably described this phenomenon as time’s…

The great French actor Jean Gabin (above) is one of many to have played Georges Simenon’s beloved Paris police inspector Jules Maigret on the big screen, and is, for us, the only one to have utterly embodied the character. One of Gabin’s more indelible, though oft overlooked, performances is in the classic 1959 film “Maigret…

Red and white might as well be the north and south poles of wine, reliably serving as stable orientation hubs on the vast and often confusing surface of planet Vino. Wine shops, wine lists and wine books all tend to organize themselves around these binary reference stations. So pervasive is the red/white divide that we…