If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!There’s a good piece over at Progressive U arguing against Esperanto and the general ideal of a universal language that we could all speak without wearing a linguistic badge of national identification.
The EU uses both English and French as […]

It’s years since I’ve made these, but it’s the last weekend of the month, the traditional time to bake for the office, so I thought I’d dig out the recipe.
170g (6oz) self raising flour
115g (4oz) caster sugar
85g (3oz) butter or margarine
115g (4oz) sultanas or raisins
4 tablespoons of condensed milk
Grated rind of a lemon (optional)
I’d recommend […]

It’s not easy getting hold of Esperanto books. High street book stores don’t stock them, so you’re usually left to pick them up second hand, most often online. As such, you rarely get to try before you buy, but my small library is slowly building up.
I’ve just got hold of a copy of Step by […]

I’ve just finished reading a whole book in a day and a half. I’m quite glad it rained too much to go out yesterday, although I’d have preferred to spend more than just a couple of hours in the sun this afternoon.
Still, it was an interesting exercise. I can’t reveal the title, and it’s not […]

An interesting story in the Yorkshire Post, about the National Conference taking place in Scarborough:
JUST like Latin, Esperanto is the supposedly dead language that won’t lie down. Hitler and Stalin tried to ban it. The internet helped to save it. Now it could be on the way to a school near you…
Esperanto was developed in […]

Looks like we’re going to get a fancy new theme park in London, 10 minutes’ walk from my desk, and just over the road from the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus:
A £7m sex theme park, which has no rides, is to open in London’s West End later this year.Visitors to Amora - The Academy […]

What do us Brits smell of? I’d not really thought about it before, but according to a story in yesterday’s Telegraph, it’s After Eight mints.
A perfume maker in a small town in Germany has put together a smelling tour of all the nations in the World Cup, with the different smells featuring on different lamp […]

Niall Cook at PR firm Hill & Knowlton, has written a piece for its corporate online mag, Ampersand, about using blogs as PR outlets. It’s a bit light on practical advice, which is probably reserved for in-house briefings, although he does say:
…anyone who treats a [blogging] community as an ‘audience’ will quickly be in trouble […]

You can find some weird and wonderful things on eBay. Hunting for anything Esperanto, hoping to turn up some old course books, I found someone selling an all-audio course on CD. It’s a single CD of just four 10-minute sessions, the first three of which are sounds of the sea. The description went on:
The final […]

Lunch with Vinnie today, where she outlined how the BBC’s disability site, Ouch, conducted a survey to see how offended disabled and non-disabled people felt about a range of words used to describe people with a disability.
The usual range of spastic, cripple, mong and window-licker came up from both camps, but the one thing it […]