In the wake of the Gillian Gibbons teddy bear brouhaha in Sudan (details here), a British author has decided to revise an existing children's book to change a character's name from Mohammed to something less potentially offensive.The Times of India reports, "Gray's book, an illustrated volume called Who's Poorly Too, has sold 40,000 copies in … Continue reading Art Imitates Life (Retroactively)
real world
Top That
I was reading a review of John MacIntyre's The Montreal Book of Everything because you never know when you might find something interesting in an unlikely place, and sure enough I came across this factoid: 80 per cent of North America's screw-top caps come from a single factory St. Césaire, 60 kilometres east of Montreal. … Continue reading Top That
Inside Joke
Life imitates art in Santa Barbara, where someone is spraypainting graffiti on the local UC campus. The red figures are in the shape of the muted trumpet (below) from Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49. In the book, the trumpet is the clue which allows the protaganist Oedipus Maas to discover the reclusive … Continue reading Inside Joke
Musings from Magers and Quinn 