Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category


What is progress?

January 11th, 2010 by Roger Darlington

A longish, but very thoughtful and thought-provoking, article on this subject was in a recent edition of the “Economist” magazine. Check it out here.

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You think you have problems …

January 9th, 2010 by Roger Darlington

Read this essay – and count yourself lucky.

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What are we going to call the new decade?

January 1st, 2010 by Roger Darlington

It took some time before we settled on the noughties as a description for the last decade. So far, we don’t have a settled terms for the new decade. The favourites appear to be the tens or the twenty tens – but other candidates include the tenties, the teens, the teenies, the tennies, or the […]

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What are the most popular names for Britain’s babies?

December 30th, 2009 by Roger Darlington

The “Mirror” newspaper has a fun story today on the most popular boys’ and girls’ names for babies born in 2009. There is a comprehensive list of the top 100 names for each gender – see here. Now I’m really fascinated by naming practices around the world and have a major section of my web […]

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Jack Bauer meets you know who …

December 26th, 2009 by Roger Darlington

… and we’re running out of time – click here.

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Our Christmas traditions

December 22nd, 2009 by Roger Darlington

The origin of many of our Christmas traditions is helpfully explained in this article.

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Cliches we love to hate

December 16th, 2009 by Roger Darlington

Today’s “Mirror” newspaper has an item listing 10 cliches that we all hate. I make fun of one of these 10 cliches in my short story “The Away Day”.

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Merry Christmas everyone

December 15th, 2009 by Roger Darlington

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Ever heard of a Chief Belief Officer?

December 6th, 2009 by Roger Darlington

No, neither had I – until a friend drew my attention to an 18-minute talk by Devdutt Pattanaik who takes an eye-opening look at the myths of India and of the West and shows how these two fundamentally different sets of beliefs about God, death and heaven help us consistently to misunderstand one another. Check […]

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Flying over London

December 6th, 2009 by Roger Darlington

See London as you’ve never seen it before here.

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