Off Topic

Okay, 11 11 11 is fast departing, and no matter how trivial you think it is, it won’t be back for a century. Meanwhile, in other 11 news, courtesy the Toronto Star Do you like playing around with ones and 11s? Take the last two digits of the year in which you were born and the age you will be this year and the result will add up to 111. It works for everyone this year. Multiplying 11s can also be cool: 111111 x 111111 = 12345654321 Follow UD News at Twitter!

Steve Martin performed the following on Letterman a few weeks back:

Here tragic mishap says something I could not quite understand, and maybe Phaedros did: In discussing speech controls , as here, I said, Anyone who doubts the story should consider that, in the modern world, huge empires imprisoning billions of people and killing tens of millions, have been based on speech control (implicitly, thought control) backed by violence. Usually, the empires’ theories were wrong, their projects useless or destructive, and their end welcome. The pity is that no one was able to shut them down quickly by making everyone mutually incomprehensible about everything. he thought I sounded “like Jared Loughner” (the alleged perpetrator of the recent Tucson, Arizona, shootings at a handshaker where the Congresswoman was seriously wounded, and many Read More ›

As many UD readers know, I am a classical pianist by training since the age of seven. The piano and classical music have been a tremendous inspiration all my life, and this was my refuge during four decades in the hideous darkness of atheism. After 2.5 centuries, great, uplifting works of musical art such as Handel’s Messiah endure. But fear not, we have in the 20th century such great classics as those by the Rolling Stones with these inspirational lyrics: I can’t get no satisfaction, I can’t get no girly action. How far we have come since Handel’s masterwork! HT: Jonathan Wells