When Greece won independence from Turkey, romantic foreigners set about reshaping it to a Classical ideal; among other things they destroyed any nonclassical buildings on the Acropolis, which was most of them, because the Acropolis was once a living town. languagehat has the sad story.
A year later I find that Hat wrote three more entries on the same subject.
Plaintiff’s Consolidated Opposition to Defendants’ Motions to Dismiss in Gilmore v Ashcroft. Related items here. John Gilmore is challenging the secret regulation which supposedly requires passengers to either show an official annotated photograph (internal passport) or submit to search.
As things stand now, it seems the only ways to travel with one’s privacy rights intact are on foot (forbidden on most highways), on a bicycle (ditto), on a horse (?), or in a chartered private vehicle (putting the burden of identification on the driver/pilot).
An interesting item from the faq:
In 2000, scheduled air carriers carried almost 632 million passengers. If the same number of passengers fly in 2002, but instead of arriving at the airport 30 minutes before their flights, they arrive 2 hours before their flights, those passengers will have collectively spent more than 100,000 years sitting uselessly in airports or standing in line to be searched.
Contrast this to the lost lives of the people who died in the 9/11 attacks. If each of the approximately 3,300 people who died lost 35 years that they would have otherwise lived, then in total they lost about the same amount of time. Government-imposed searches waste as much life every year as the lifetimes that the attack wasted.
Here in the ogre’s cave we get only a few television channels. One of them shows, each weekend, an astonishingly bad movie; not merely the dull-witted clutter that fills up the hours between infomercials for other stations, but atrocities approaching Ed Wood standards.
We generally have no way of knowing what the flick is, but this week, my housemate said, “Oh, it’s the Bad Movie. Oh, Robert Vaughn is in this one, and I think that’s whatsername who was in Last Tango.” In a minute or two I was able to say, “The only movie with Robert Vaughn and Maria Schneider from Last Tango is The Babysitter. The mini-review at IMDb says this director’s films got worse and worse until, after The Babysitter, he had the sense to retire.”
Wonderful times, ennit?
Why aren’t more servers this clever?
The document name you requested (/archive/wc99.gif) could not be found on this server. However, we found documents with names similar to the one you requested.
Available documents:
/archive/wc099.gif (character missing)
/archive/wc199.gif (character missing)
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From Michael Jennings, “how the corporate downsizing of AOL Time Warner led to a mad New Zealander making three movies of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.”
But, for now, some stories can have happy endings. (At least one insane bearded New Zealander is now insanely rich. And I think a world in which insane bearded New Zealanders can become insanely rich by making ludicrously over-ambitious movies is better than one where this is not the case).
(Link from Scott Wickstein, The Eye of the Beholder)
I wouldn’t have thought the EU could be so crude – yet.
Laws were being forced through the Polish Parliament, at the behest of the EU . . . . Perhaps the most insidious new provision in the Polish Constitution is that a law can be enforced in Poland even if it has not been translated into Polish.
One commenter comments, We need to move our remaining troops out of Germany and into Poland and the Czech Republic.
