Warwick Cairns

Getting Emotional

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I want to start by telling you a story. It’s a very short and rather odd story, but it’s one that says a lot about quite a lot of things. One of these things is the power of your emotions. Another is the bizarre antics that postgraduate scientists get up to with their research grants, [...]

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In which I say ‘coloured’

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Lately I’ve taken to reading the London Gazette. There’s not a lot in it to like, really. It’s not what you’d call a riveting read. You get a sense of what it’s like from how it describes itself. ‘A modern, efficient way to disseminate and record official, regulatory and legal information’ is what the blurb [...]

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If Travel Broadens the Mind…

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 Travel, they say, broadens the mind. Adds perspective. Opens up the outlook and so on. Makes you sophisticated and cosmopolitan. If you’ve been nowhere other than where you’re from, except on holiday; if you’ve lived in no place other than the place you know, what does that make you? What is the word for it? [...]

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An Atheist’s Guide to Lucky Pigs

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I am reminded of a story about the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr, who was visited at his home in Tisvilde, near Copenhagen, by an American scientist. They had just entered Bohr’s study when the American notice a ‘lucky’ horse-shoe nailed above the door, open-side upwards in the correct and approved manner, so that the luck [...]

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In A Perfect World It Would Be Spiders For Lunch

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Why being irrational saves us from a life of Bush-Tucker Trials  Why Not Eat Insects? Not my question, by the way, but the title of a book. It was a book first published in the 1880s by a man by the name of Vincent M Holt, and it’s not been out of print since. In [...]

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Odin’s Police Force

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Or… What life might be like today if the Vikings had won? The problem, I think, is that we are suckers for novelty. It gives us a frisson of cosmopolitanism to use words like frisson. We are suckers for words like suckers. It gives us an air of imagined sophistication to walk boldly into the [...]

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Two Thousand And Twelve

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2012 puzzles me – as did 2008, and 2004 and just about every Olympic year. Once every four years something seems to happen to all these minor sports, and all these boring sports, and all these sports that most normal human beings don’t normally give a damn about.

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The Alien’s Guide To Alcohol

I just don’t like the taste of most alcohol, apart from the sort of stuff old ladies drink in thimble-sized glasses at Christmas.

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He only does it to annoy because he knows it teases.

Why should human-human partnerships be the only kind to be celebrated in society and recognised in law? Is that not a blatantly speciesist thing?

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The Devil’s Party

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Sometimes unrelieved goodness can get rather cloying. Sometimes you need the destructive power of negative energy, just to shake things up and just to restore balance in the world.

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