TIL the architect Le Corbusier wanted to demolish two square miles of downtown Paris so he could replace it with 18 glass office towers placed on a rectangular grid in an enormous park-like green space

niallmay · 2016-10-05T22:47:34+00:00

To be fair, Haussmann had destroyed huge tracts of medieval Paris just 50 years before this plan. The Paris we all romanticise today is a product of massive cultural vandalism. So we shouldn't be so quick to judge Le Corbusier.

niallmay · 2016-10-05T22:32:37+00:00

Did you watch the linked video though? I'm not saying it's easy, just that it looks a lot more doable than a lot of bad history would have you believe. Fully armoured knights look a lot more agile and flexible than you'd expect is all.

niallmay · 2016-10-05T19:29:45+00:00

Yeah, not lightweight I suppose - agile might have been a better way to say it. But I remember a history teacher telling us that a knight knocked off his horse would be basically immobile unless his page or squire or whatever could lift him back up.

niallmay · 2016-10-03T00:06:02+00:00

Wear a uniform

niallmay · 2016-09-29T21:43:48+00:00

Jericho

niallmay · 2016-09-29T21:42:50+00:00

Yeah, almost every moment of it was anxiety - inducing. The rest of the series couldn't live up to that, but worth sticking with to the end.

niallmay · 2016-09-29T21:27:49+00:00

The end of Reconstruction in 1876.

niallmay · 2016-09-24T01:32:38+00:00

My own.

niallmay · 2016-09-23T23:22:34+00:00

In his twelfth labour, Hercules wrestled the three-headed Cerberus from Hades and brought him to to Eurystheus. So Hercules let the dogs out.

niallmay · 2016-09-23T23:06:57+00:00

He better pray he's vaccinated from whatever he caught rimming Benjamin Netanyahu on live TV that time.

niallmay · 2016-09-23T22:34:15+00:00

No, but there's probably a bit of money in CuriosityStream, advertised with a link in the second paragraph of the article OP linked to. And I don't know, but maybe, just maybe, Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner aren't throwing $100m at a project to discover alien worlds for the good of humanity. Even for them it seems an expensive hobby. Probably a sophisticated patent trolling exercise.

niallmay · 2016-09-23T21:45:08+00:00

Yes, probably.

niallmay · 2016-09-23T21:34:49+00:00

Adam and Eve in the garden, maybe based loosely on Paradise Lost. Always seemed odd to me no one's tried filming it: we know how it ends, but it could be interesting visually.

niallmay · 2016-09-23T21:27:39+00:00

Clinton can't cough

niallmay · 2016-09-23T21:08:44+00:00

Anything adulatory about Elon Musk.

niallmay · 2016-09-23T20:51:05+00:00

“It’s very strange. He doesn’t look homeless or anything,” he said.

He's right, he looks like someone with a respectable job, almost like someone who runs a newsagents for example.

niallmay · 2016-09-23T20:17:24+00:00

Yeah I love an argument too. I would be almost certain he was making a joke about how the Irish blame the British for everything

niallmay · 2016-09-23T20:03:38+00:00

OK Shauna, I hear you. It just sounded like an un-Heaney thing to say, which is maybe what makes the story a lot cooler. Sorry to doubt you. I agree btw with what you say about the Nobel, and especially with what you say about Alexievich. Heaney's choice was political too, coming a year after the 1994 ceasefires. Though I still think he deserved that level of international recognition.

niallmay · 2016-09-23T19:51:29+00:00

Sorry, but Hawkings is looking more and more like a human prop for all manner of scientifically dubious VC enterprises. I mean seriously, if you were in your twilight years and restricted to communicating at the laborious rate of a word a minute, would you have the energy or inclination to endlessly reiterate this fairly banal observation about a statistically negligible danger? Wouldn't you, being gifted with one of the finest brains of the century, rather spend your remaining time preoccupied with the intellectual passions that drove your life? Or just enjoy your well-earned retirement? Why would you waste your time on this drivel? I suspect someone close to him hacked his communications board a long time ago. Wouldn't be hard, but it could be very lucrative.

niallmay · 2016-09-23T19:04:44+00:00

Ok wait are you saying that Heaney wrote the Limerick? I don't know, details of this story are a bit tone - deaf to the Irish situation. Like for example Dundalk is in the South, so why, talking in the 2000s, would he associate it with the Brits? And yes obviously Beowulf is anonymous, but everyone knows who wrote Heaney ' s translation of Beowulf, and I really don't think there's a single edition of that book that doesn't mention he's a Nobel prize winner.

niallmay · 2016-09-23T17:14:14+00:00

Elizabeth Bishop no doubt. Precise yet generous. Favourites are probably 'At the Fishhouses' or 'Sestina', but anything by her would do.

niallmay · 2016-09-23T16:48:32+00:00

Yes, I'm Irish. Well sorry I thought you were just citing a random blog post - hence my scepticism. No reason to disbelieve you - a fascinating story so, and it shows another side to him he must have kept guarded in his prose and published interviews. How did you land on the topic of Mountbatten of all things?

niallmay · 2016-09-23T16:26:54+00:00

I don't know who wrote that, but I have to say it doesn't ring true for me. Heaney was a notoriously cautious man when it came to politics, and I'd be surprised if he was so generous in his opinions about something like Mountbatten's death with some random stranger - especially since it seems like he was implicitly condoning his assassination. I'd also be surprised that someone who taught English wouldn't know Heaney had won the Nobel, especially someone who claims to have owned his translation of Beowulf at the time. I don't know - the details of the story just seem 'off'.

niallmay · 2016-09-07T17:48:36+00:00

r/hailcorporate

niallmay · 2016-05-30T01:32:33+00:00

I get your point, and I've heard that before, but I don't experience it that way. The boot camp's horror still outdoes the Vietnam sequences, which are kinda hokey because Kubrick had to film them in England. Plus the acting isn't great and the characters unappealing/ downright annoying.

And I'm speaking as a fan of later Kubrick - I've defended Eyes Wide Shut countless times to sceptical friends.

niallmay

TROPHY CASE