BEST LINE OF THE DAY (from The Rejectionist’s review of Anonymous): “I find complaining about scholarly inaccuracy in a Roland Emmerich film to be analogous to expressing displeasure that Transformers does not correctly represent the mechanics of the internal combustion engine.”
“Spanish Blood,” a short story from The Simple Art Of Murder anthology by Raymond Chandler.
“Habeas corpus,” an ironically titled essay on the non-necessity of murder in crime fiction, by Lynne Patrick at Hey There’s a Dead Guy In The Living Room. And, in the same vein, I’m catching up on the shenanigans at Slushpile Hell.
A science piece at the New York Times about how causing senescent cells to self-destruct could prevent many of the symptoms of aging. Sounds like forced retirement for the microscopic set!
COCKSWAIN, or COXEN, the officer who manages and steers a boat, and has the command of the boat’s crew. It is evidently compounded of the words cock and swain, the former of which was anciently used for a yawl or small boat, as appears by several authors; but it has now become obsolete, and is never used by our mariners.