Hi fellow bloggers. Read some things in the free Metro that you might find interesting.



1. The power of words. There has been a culture recently that saying 'sorry' allows you to get away with a lot. MPs and footballers for example. I remember a teacher of ours being angry with us when we said sorry for something, with a grin on our faces. He would say 'you are not sorry. Sorry means you are full of sorrow, which you are not.' & of course he was right. So I was surprised to see two examples of this on the same page.



"Hitman Says 'Sorry' Over 27 Murders." - apparently his sentence will not change, but he will receive £30 a month to buy goods from the jail canteen. (He is banned from writing a book about his crimes. The law must be different in Canada.)



"Give Sorry Khmer Boss His Own Cell." - Comrade Duch, of the Khmer Rouge, should be given his own cell because he said sorry for his crimes, his lawyer argued. Seems there is often an incentive for the apology.



2. "Gadsby: Champion of Youth, by Ernest Vincent Wright written in 1939 is noticable for not using the letter 'e' once in its 50,000 plus words. This inspired other writers to do the same thing, notably George Perec in La Disparition. " Which is an obvious link to the book 'Eunoia' by Chritian Bok, which only uses one vowel in each of its 5 chapters.



3. A new book by Alain de Botton, 'The Pleasure And Sorrows Of Work.' (I know about the latter.) He says ' Most modern fiction suggests all people do is fall in love and murder each other. It doesn't give you an idea of how central work is to people's experience.' He has written a 'poetically minded collection of extended essays that observe the rituals and internal culture of nine very different jobs.' Seems like a fairly unique book.



Finally, here is another calligramme. The words actually spell out what they are depicting. Needs to be seen in full screen.



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