Month: August 2015

Life is too short to be content with commonplace ideas and philosophies society bombards us with. What use is being called Homo sapiens, “the thinking man,” if we refrain from using every bit of time we have left to enhance our meditating faculties? So in the interest of the purely rational mind and for the sake of posterity, we have compiled a list of intellectual tasks and mental exercises you can perform to expand your mind:

1. Start reading serious books. — Stephen Hawking didn’t become Stephen Hawking by reading Spider-Man, and Ayn Rand didn’t come up with Objectivism by immersing herself in sleazy romance novels! Chuck out every non-serious, fun, and emotional book or reading material you have in your shelves and start collecting those leather-bound tome-like ones without any pictures. If the font is smaller than size 8, that’s a good sign you’re in the right direction. Burn…

The photos in this post are mine, from my visit to Poland in late May and early June. The full set, annotated and viewable as a slideshow, is available here. I have provided English-language links where I could, but much of the information I used is only available in Polish. I marked those links with an asterisk, to save you a click if you do not speak the language.

The Polish-Soviet Friendship (officially, Brothership-in-Arms) Monument in Legnica was built in 1951*. It stands in the Słowiański Square, right in the city center. Two soldiers, one Polish and one Soviet, shake hands while a little girl held by the Pole embraces both of them. Poland, invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union acting in agreement, then devastated in the conflict between them, occupied and plundered by both even as its soldiers fought on every front they could find, finally…

I visited M&Ms World in Leicester Square this Tuesday, for the first time in rather a long time, but to be honest with you I’m not sure why they bother calling it M&Ms World at all anymore. The whole thing is just Minions.

As many of you will know, I’ve thought and written quite extensively about the M&Ms store in the past. From the moment I first saw the M&Ms store, in October 2011, I was completely fascinated with it. Posing as an amusingly left-field attempt to market a hard-shelled chocolate candy, the M&Ms store in fact represented the attempt to replicate the entire world, in M&Ms form. Aside from the sweet itself, you could buy anything at all in the M&Ms store, filtered and distorted through the prism of the five M&Ms character-candies: not just food but clothing; domestic appliances; farming equipment; all of the most terrible engines…