Words Worth Noting - December 11, 2022

“Dark Mofo’s adults-only playground/ ‘Satanise your hands’ read the label, capturing in three words the anarchic daring of Hobart’s winter arts festival as it returns to full speed after lockdowns.”

Headline and deck on flattering story about a festival “with its famously subversive branding that twists religious iconography” in The Australian June 21, 2022 (from my “Hidden in plain sight” files)

John Robson
Words Worth Noting - December 9, 2022

Journalist W.R. “Titterton tells of an interview with the Aga Khan, in which His Highness said that if a wall fell and crushed his foot he would exclaim: ‘This is the best thing that could have happened to me.’ To which Chesterton responded, ‘Then I feel inclined to retort that the Persian language must be singularly deficient in expletives.’”

An author whose name I failed to record in Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 2 #6 Issue 15 (April-May, 1999)

Words Worth Noting - December 8, 2022

“L’histoire, qui nous apprend ce qui arrive dans le monde, nous montre également les grands événements et les médiocres; cette confusion d’objets nous empêche souvent de discerner avec assez d’attention les choses extraordinaires qui sont renfermées dans le course de chaque siècle. Celui où nous vivons en a produit, à mon sense, de plus singuliers que les précédents.”

La Rochefoucauld Maximes (start of Réflexions Diverses XIX. Des événements de ce siècle)

Words Worth Noting - December 7, 2022

“I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.”

C.S. Lewis God in the Dock quoted by Martin Capages Jr. on Substack [https://martincapagesjrphdpe.substack.com/p/c-s-lewis-on-climate-change-and-the]

I pledge allegiance to myself, and to the ego for which I stand

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the proposal to exempt Quebec MNAs from an oath of allegiance to our actual Constitution in favour of some pompous make-believe is a dangerous relativist attack on the rule of law.