Thinking Out Aloud

While in Venezia, we were quite taken with the variety of chess sets available. And replica weapons, and figurines and ... But, alas, th...

Chairman exiting his bank In a real sense, human history starts with the creation of a social surplus, a surplus beyond simple subsi...

Tonight, went and listened to Prof. Stephen Knight talk at Melbourne University about emotion in Culhwch ac Olwen and Chretien de Troyes ...

Does this count as food p0rn? One of the joys of travelling around Venezia in particular was the plentiful gelati outlets, with a wide v...

Dr Horwitz's thoughtful and generous  response  to my  original post  is useful in clarifying what a serious Austrian school economist ...

Getting a thighful It is a cliche that art has attracted a few queer (as in not heterosexual and/or gender conforming) folk over the...

While taking the train across the Maribyrnong River, I have been observing the building of a Buddhist temple on the Western bank the most ...

The only place during our week in Venezia my business partner and I deliberately went back to to have another look was the Naval Museum. ...

There have been two great transformations in human affairs. One is  the Neolithic Revolution , the transition from foraging to farming. Th...

This is the (small) castle at  Acicastello , on the Sicilian coast north of the Roman and Aragonese capital of  Catania , from a distance....

One of the more irritating historical memes is the preposterous notion that the American Civil War was not "really" about slaver...

Catholics and Orthodox are the Hindus of the Abrahamic world. The divine order is populated with many Personages--not merely the Trinity, ...

Conservative philosopher-blogger Keith Burgess-Jackson  had already predicted  that, if Obama loses the November 2012 election, the Left ...

The Queen of Heaven Madonna and child images are common in Malta, it being a (very) Catholic country. It was charming to see her ref...