avva | bits and pieces (англ.)

Зачитался вчера. Вышибала в нью-йоркском ночном клубе ведет веблог. Хорошо пишет!
Много, много ссылок на скетчи Монти Пайтона на youtube. Замечательная подборка.
Оказывается, критика Вильяма Эмпсона выгнали в 29-м году из Кэмбриджа после того, как прислуга нашла в его комнате презерватив. Заодно я узнал британский эвфемизм для презервативов - "French letters". Сам Эмпсон описывал это так:

"I don’t know how much details would amuse you. The Master (with an air of melancholy conviction) told me that anybody who had ever touched a French letter, no matter when or why, could never again be allowed with safety in the company of young men, because he was sure in some subtle way, however little he himself wished it, to pollute their innocence; and this in spite of the fact that his own intellectual powers would have been destroyed. As an act of grace I was allowed to poison the air of Magdalene for a day after my exposure, and this gave time for several of my judges to come and explain that I must not bear a grudge, or that what they had done would be the best thing for me in the end, or that ‘personally’ they thought their own actions a Great Pity, or that though they were not addicted to Those Particular Vices (I wept with rage when this was said to me) I was to understand they had extremely Broad Minds (pp. 8-9)"

Что ж, неудивительно, наверное, что "The oldest known depiction of a condom being used during sexual intercourse is a 12,000 - 15,000 years old cave painting in France" (Википедия).
(via Little Professor) Замечательный способ убедить меня не читать книгу - современный пересказ "Илиады" - разрекламировать ее так: "Many of us have probably read parts of Homer's epic The Iliad. Some may even have slogged through its heavy prose to the end. Some of you may even have understood what you were reading. For the rest of us there is this new reworking of The Iliad. Gone are the pesky line breaks, intrusive gods, and archaic phrasing. It's the same timeless story, but it now reads like an entirely new book."
В том же блоге - обзор интересной новой книги о чтении и читателях в 18-19 веках: "The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period". Его невозможно пересказать в двух словах; просто замечу, что там немало интересного, и рекомендую.