AKMA’s Random Thoughts

The news has recently called our attention to special events at cathedrals, a session of ‘crazy golf’ in Rochester, and a Helter Skelter in Norwich. These extraordinary installations have been planned to get people into cathedrals, on the premise that someone who has never set foot in a cathedral before (or never in that particular…

Ah, when the morning showers fall on the newly-laid hot-top…

• Since I’m blogging again, more or less, it seems as though I should rely more on Flickr as my medium for online images, so I spent some time uploading to and titling and tagging photos in my Flickr feed. I’ll devote mindless moments to retrospective Flickring, too, so the Facebook years should be covered…

Just re-reading Lyotard’s Driftworks for my hermeneutics monograph project, and admiring all the more some of his observations. In ‘Adrift’, the preface to the collection, he notes (with regard to criticism, but it applies much more generally) the phenomenon of wayfinding when you’re out of place: ‘…when you enter a foreign city and follow the…

No, of course you can get from Oxford to Cambridge (and back) — but it’s annoyingly complicated, involving a choice among (a) train in to London, then out to Cambridge; (b) coach from Oxford to Cambridge, a long ride stopping numerous times and navigating every roundabout possible along the route; or (c) Margaret just learned…

I just started out on my mile despite the pit-a-pat of the beginning of showers — I thought I could get it in before the heavier rain — but within about twenty strides I turned back. The tendon/ligament inside my thigh was prominently uncomfortable, and I decline to risk aggravating it (especially in slippery weather).

Anyone who’s thinking that Trump will be a white knight for a No-Deal Britain, offering a trade haven to make up for the loss of EU trade arrangements, should take a quick look at his modus operandi in past deal-making. He typically zeroes in on a perceived weakness, and exploits it to gain favourable terms…

I’ve been distracted for a day or so by the discovery of the Digital Diamond Baseball game, available through Steam. Among the many virtues of this baseball sim lies in its openness to user-prepared content (if you don’t see this as prime AKMA-bait, you don’t know me that well). The game itself offers many recreated…

At a [birth]day party for Brendan, discovering that I’ll actually be preaching at two patronal festivals in the coming days, not only the one I expected.…

Next time, I won’t print the densely-typeset French article two-a-page.

‘Therefore, the more manifestly each drawing demonstrates the truth, the more openly through this dissimilar similitude it proves that it is a drawing and not the truth. And in this, dissimilar similitudes lead our understanding further toward the truth because they do not allow it to dwell on likeness alone.’ [translation Oliver W. Norris, in…