Riffle

Heroic Grump I caught a wonderful line while watching BBC News America's report on the Blair testimony at the Chilcot Inquiry today. Pa...

The other day I made passing reference to the ubiquity of the plainchant tune Dies Irae . Ever helpful, the BBC has put together a program ...

Image by Cwluc. http://www.flickr.com/photos/cwluc/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 For years we've all watched more and more people texting while walki...

Overweight Woman Sentenced in Boyfriend's 'Sitting' Death : "'So basically you can say that I can go sit on somebody an...

When I was a kid, our neighborhood's lyric for that tune snippet was: There's a place in France Where the belly dancers dance. Turns...

I'm exasperated at how cowardly the Democrats are now that they have only the second largest Senate majority in decades. Rather than fig...

The Massachusetts Senate loss is still making me very unhappy. But my hard-hitting report yesterday about bourbon flavor set me to look for...

That Massachusetts Senate race loss really sucks . What a terrible candidate Coakley was. She was like bourbon flavoring. Why did that come ...

"Cuss" graffitti from Fantastic Mr. Fox, ineptly highlighted by me. 2010 has made me think that the Y2K bug did indeed hit -- jus...

The invaluable Dave Weigel at the Washington Independent spotted someone selling The Sarah Palin Embryo Ornament . Ten dollars plus shippin...

Illustration from Historiae Animalium (1551-1558) by Conrad Gesner. The National Library of Medicine has released, as part of a larger pro...

The Economist skillfully draws a fascinating article out of a dorm bull-session topic: What is the most difficult language? For instance,...

I'm slowly sliding into this year. Here's a tidbit from the (very enjoyable) 1998 BBC production of Vanity Fair . A busker, presum...

No, no no. You're not in the way. Telegraph.co.uk: Police hunt supermarket bottom sniffer. [Video available at link: it's creepy....

I realize that, as an American liberal, I'm supposed to hate Christmas and want to wage war on and defile it. But, of course, I don...

Nowadays nostalgia is a paltry thing. TV, notoriously, builds itself on nostalgia for incidents that happened just a moment ago. In commer...

A few things I've found funny recently (in one meaning of "funny" or another), from short to long. "Dexter" is Latin...

Norman Rockwell, who is often close to kitsch but undoubtedly skilled (and appraisal of whom yo-yos quite a bit) painted from photographs o...

There's one person who performed in-studio during the same TV program on which the Sex Pistols made their first TV appearance; appeared...

A correction at washingtonpost.com : "A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song de...