I wonder if anyone else does this:

When browsing on Amazon, especially for books, I always look at the reviews to give me a sense of what the product is like. But I have a particular fondness for reading 1-star reviews for books that by and large everyone else loves.

If you never do this, I can recommend it as a hobby, if only for the unintentional humour. Some day when I'm bored, I'll do a quiz on LJ and see if you can guess the book from the critical review.

In the meantime, I came across something similar on the website of a certain daily rag - comments on the worst books of the decade. It's just as good but because it is the readers of this particular newspaper (or at least its website), so they are all comments about Booker prize winners and similar that the reader thought was rubbish. Oh, except for The da Vinci Code, which of course none of them have actually read, but they know they hate it. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/dec/08/worst-books-of-the-decade

Here's a bit of formal logic (not actually written using the correct notation since it's nineteen years since I did any formal logic, and I gave it up as soon as I could, although I did have a fairly famous tutor and had tutorials in C.S. Lewis's old rooms in Magdalen):


A is bad. Something must be done about A. B is something. Therefore B must be done.

Hopefully you don't need to have studied formal logic to realise that this argument is clearly bollocks. Yet you see it used in politics and journalism pretty much all the time.

That really annoys me.

It turns out that the biker in the accident on Wednesday night is a friend of someone on my friends list on facebook.

Actually, when you think about it, that's not as much of a coincidence as you think. He's 18, which makes him the same school year as last year's 'You're Hired!' entrants. There is probably a pretty good chance that every eighteen year old in Plymouth knows someone who knows me. Which is a strange thought somehow.

Fulfilling a longstanding commitment to pellegrina, a review of...

Emphyrio, by Jack Vance

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