This is a rare Public Service Announcement.
If you want to learn Chinese, and you live in Leamington Spa, Warwick, Coventry, Birmingham, or Oxford in England, you should seriously consider signing up to the service provided by citrella.co.uk. For only £15 per hour, you can have one-on-one Chinese lessons with a bilingual native speaker, with the first hour provided for free. This is available for all skill levels, from total beginner to almost fluent.
Thus ends the Announcement.
UPDATE: You just want the damn link, don’t you? Here it is, philistine:
http://feed43.com/christopherhitchens.xml
ORIGINAL POST:
Christopher Hitchens is a writer of both hefty repute and substantial disrepute. I came across his ornamental, offensive, and thoughtful prose on slate.com, where he has a column. He seems to be a little more famous now, thanks to the publication of his latest book, “God is not Great”, an anti-theist tract. With a propitiously controversial topic, and published at around the same time as Richard Dawkins’ soothingly-titled “The God Delusion”, it sold quite a lot of copies, and thence gave Mr. Hitchens a good few opportunities to speak his mind on these matters at various debates and gatherings: a delight for the likes of you and I, as Mr. Hitchens is also rather good at venting his sharp, polite insults orally (for an example of his supreme wordsmanship, you could do worse than click on this link to a video of him giving his less-than-complimentary opinion of the very late, and hopefully speedily rotting, Jerry Falwell).
Given these attractions, would it not be nice in the extreme, nice to the bleeding edge of niceness, to have a way to read his latest über-guff? Instead of maintaining a blog or some even more newfangled device, Mr. Hitchens maintains a webpage of his oeuvre, intermittently updated. Yippee doo da!, and other exclamations of joy!
But what if you don’t want to, or can’t, or simply shouldn’t visit this webpage every time you want to find out if the great man has done some more great work, especially when you run the risk of disappointment that nothing has changed there in the 30 minutes since you last checked? Why, my poor, deluded, pathetic friend, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of his page, preferably through my non-sponsor, bloglines.com. Wait, there’s no RSS feed of his page, that sort of thing being one of those overly newfangled doodahs he can’t cope with? Don’t worry, I made one for him, with a little help from feed43.com.
That feed is linked… here. (If you’re using bloglines, as I recommended, you could try clicking here instead.) This is what you came for. Come and have it. Don’t read any of the preceding paragraphs: I certainly didn’t, and I’m supposed to have written them.
Go away now and read something by someone who knows what they’re talking about.
(If someone can get Christopher Hitchens to thank me personally, you don’t need to do that. It’s an honour to have done this for him. If he still wants to get in touch, I won’t stop him.)
Peter led me to this hilarious and moving montage, and by linking to it here I am satisfying the immediate urge that I felt that I had to share this with someone, and soon! Thank you for helping me.
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