John Gordon Ross

The post is another country.
They do things differently there.

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This video is unclassified because I have no reason at all for posting it, except – why not? Found on Futility Closet, the site of my semi-namesake, Greg Ross. A once-cuddly lion cub had outgrown his bourgeois pet status and been released into the semi-wilderness of a wildlife reserve to save his owners the [...]

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Punctuation purists led by John Richards, founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, are up in arms over Birmingham City Council’s decision to omit apostrophes from street signs. Reactions have run from the usual indignation to outright horror. Apostrophe Abuse ironizes about it cleverly, calling Birmingham “the city where apostrophes arent welcome,” while Apostrophe Catastrophes goes [...]

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Over at You Don’t Say,* the blog of Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre, there has been a discussion going on about Wikipedia. I must point out that the Wikipediaphobes have not, quite, said that the online encyclopaedia will bring about the End of Civilization etc. as the title of this post would suggest. On [...]

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Even with the abundance of flesh available on the Internet nowadays, the word “nipple” elicits schoolboy humour, and my Guitar Nipple thread (Is Guitar Nipple a Hoax?) caused more hilarity than interest on the Delcamp forum. Some reactions:
- “Watching topic to keep abreast of developments”
- “I’ll ask my teat-cher”
- “I think you’ve managed [...]

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I posted the following on Jean-François Delcamp’s classical guitar forum, but just in case any guitarists in the know run across this post first:
There’s a thread going about the recently disclosed cello scrotum hoax which I don’t want to hijack. But the doubt is raised. by none other than Baroness Murphy herself, who must be [...]

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I’ve always been uneasy with tolls. I mean, a toll entails stopping someone at point C who has left A and needs to get to B and charging them money before allowing them to continue. So what is the difference between that and pointing a blunderbuss at your victim and saying “Stand and deliver?” Unfortunately, [...]

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David Beaver has a post on Language Log about George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. I find much to disagree with in Mr Beaver’s post, and Language Log’s Comments Policy says “blog comments should be short. If you have a lot to say, post it on your own blog and link to [...]

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I’m not sure I entirely believe in what is being called “The Girl Effect,” but this is a mean Flash video:

You’ll find the original on Girleffect.org. The idea is that investing in education of, specifically, girls rather than boys is the best way to improve the economies of developing countries (and so make the world [...]

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Found on Overheard Everywhere (I run the feed from Overheard in the Office on the Whittle It page, but I love them all, even if many of the entries sound more scripted than accidentally eavesdropped on):
The Best Apples Don’t Go Into Applesauce. Or Teaching
English teacher (about Don Pedro in Much Ado about Nothing: “Don” [...]

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