Author: zephauerbach

A few weeks ago I took my first visit to the public swimming baths in Surrey Quays.  Walking up the disabled access ramp, I felt a little ashamed, for I harboured a snobbish trepidation: could I really go back to public bathing, after the dizzy heights of my Virgin Active days?  To a place devoid of all jacuzzi and sauna? A place where the soap would not be free? Continue reading “The Public Swimming Baths in Surrey Quays”

Recently I achieved something special: I successfully found someone on an internet dating website.  I’m not going to say I was lucky, because that would be misleading. Was Kasparov lucky when he beat Topalov in 1999?  Hardly.

Dating is ultimately a game.  I apologise for the reference to chess; that was misleading.  The game that I think comes closest to it, from my personal experience, is probably Sins of a Solar Empire.  Once you’ve dated for a while, you’ll see why. Continue reading “How to Win at Dates”

One of the benefits of living in Bermondsey is that, once a year, I’m woken up by the baying crowds lining the streets of the London Marathon. The running, the running: here we go again.  I haven’t missed a marathon for the last twenty years, so I thought I’d chuck on my ancient Amsterdam Marathon 2010 t-shirt (once neon red, now a rather anemic pink) and trot down.  Bask in the nostalgia.  All glory to it, all things I am and own are because of the London Marathon. Continue reading “The London Marathon”

Some people might remember the post I wrote about a trip to The Tesco in Surrey Quays.  I would like to formally apologise to Tesco PLC, because I let my imagination run a little wild.  I wasn’t being completely serious.  In this commentary I’m aiming at a greater degree of verisimilitude. Just the facts.  None of the paranoia.  The truth – whether that be cold, hard, or just warm and kind of spongy. Continue reading “Return to The Tesco in Surrey Quays”

OK, so this all started off one night in 2004 when I was hanging around Russell Square, waiting for the 188 bus, around 8ish, after a late lecture on the categorical imperative.  Who did I notice out of the corner of my eye?  None other than Robert Nozick.  Star-struck, I kept my head down and only allowed myself furtive looks as he bounded down the street.  I entertained the idea of asking him for his signature, but I realised the only book I had on me was the Tractatus, and that would’ve just been inappropriate.

Continue reading “Me, Nozick, and Jack Daniels”

Here I will introduce five simplistic positions and attack them.  These are all ‘straw men’ – weak and faceless, built to represent nobody’s argument in particular – yet I don’t feel they are entirely disconnected from things people say in the real world. The topic of this episode is: lazy economics.  I doubt that anything here will come as news to even the most amateur economist.  Yet we live in a world where lazy economics abounds.   Lazy economics, like lazy science, must have a bucket of cold water thrown in its face.  I am not an actual economist, I am just a slightly less lazy one, but I am filling up my buckets. Continue reading “A Massacre of Straw Men: Episode 1”

This is basically four bad articles for the price of one.  Split four ways, that’s £0.00 each. And I’m throwing in a preamble at no extra cost.   Pretty good sting for your sterling.

I’m not sure if this happens to anybody else, but often I find myself falling in love with a phrase without really knowing what it means – before the point of its maturity from nonsense to sense.  Since I am happy in the knowledge that our minds are abuzz with indeterminacy, incomprehensibility, and contradiction, I don’t lose any sleep over this.  Once I ‘fix’ on what the phrase ‘actually means’ then it loses something special which it had before; rather like how a child – a young shoot aching to branch off in every which way – at some point actually becomes a man, like a plumber. And then everybody says: ‘Ah, he was always meant to be a plumber!’ Continue reading “The Juice is Out!”

Last Wednesday I had the good opportunity to see the great philosopher Derek Parfit give the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Annual Lecture at University College London.   The place was packed to the rafters with eminent philosophers.  It is hard to discern when an eminent philosopher is discreetly, internally squealing with excitement, but I was quite sure that in this lecture theatre there were dozens of eminent philosophers doing just that.  And quite rightly so: Derek Parfit’s ‘Reasons and Persons’ is a masterpiece of highly wrought rational argumentation; the erudite audience had high hopes. Continue reading “The Head of Derek Parfit”

“Hello”, as I think the people of your time say.  The date is 5th June 2037.  The insane engineers of my era have enabled me to send this report back in time thanks to Time Regression Communicative Technologies, developed under the auspices of The Institute of Scientifically Masked Literary Contrivances.

But that’s not all that our unstoppable technologists have done!  Continue reading “Dating Websites in 2037”

This is the first article on fashion which I have ever written.  Every now and again, I feel like I’ve got the hang of what ‘fashion’ is.  I go to the shops, I look for it, I find it in the Sales section, I congratulate myself on finding it at a discount price, I leave the shops, and by the time I’m got outside I find that ‘fashion’ has changed.

Then I get home and read The Guardian and see that the ‘fashion’ I just purchased is made out of the bone marrow of Nepalese orphans.  Oy Vey. Continue reading “White Socks”