Caitlin Burke

I don’t have any spiritual beliefs, but when I’ve lost a pet, I always find myself hoping that kitty is in an eternal sunspot somewhere, having a nice nap. It’s just a nice wish for someone you want the best for.

I feel that way about Steve Jobs. Maybe not the sunspot part, but wouldn’t it be nice if he’s someplace warm, maybe looking at turtlenecks with Carl Sagan? (Surely that little legal dust-up is water under the bridge by now—and Steve wasn’t even there at the time, right?)

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Hilary Mantel remains my favourite literary stoic, however. Despite her producing A Place of Greater Safety and other magnificent novels, prize juries overlooked her. After she finally won the Booker in 2009, she had every right to be triumphalist. Instead, she wrote in the Economist of how ‘once, when I was trudging home from my second failure to win the £20,000 Sunday Express award, a small boy I knew bobbed out on to the balcony of his flat. “Did you win?” I shook my head. “Never mind,” he said, just like everyone else. And then, quite unlike everyone else: “If you like, you can come up and play with my guinea pig.”’ I suspect that Mantel knew for years that she was the real thing, and just needed to wait for the rest of us to catch up.

From July 9 Diary, by Nick Cohen, which is mainly about something else entirely.

More about the remarkable launch of the sifaka.

These were made a couple of years ago, but they’re still beautiful:

The campaign is for a treatment for Alzheimer’s.

More. [He also has a portfolio site under his own name-as-domain-name, but it's dominated by a super-pokey Adobe Flash interface that makes it grim to navigate.]

I wanted to not like this, but then I watched the video, and I liked it.

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