Quick Hits: Contraception, Belgianness, Myrna Loy Riding an Ostrich

The singer of “Potverdekke, It’s Great to Be a Belgian,” John Makin, has died.

Owen Hatherley: “There’s a reason why nobody reads this book anymore — because Wiener’s central thesis was so resoundingly disproved. He predicts that in bringing back ‘market discipline,’ Thatcher will rejuvenate British industry and the ‘northern’ values it inculcated — instead, the industrial centres of Tyneside, Clydeside and Teeside, South Wales and the West Midlands, Greater Manchester and the West Riding all faced a cataclysm on such a scale that most have still not recovered.”

Fifty Books Project: “McCoy contends the relationship between Hamlet and his father’s ghost mirrors the Reformation-era compulsion for an obviated spiritual presence in the Catholic sacraments.”

Myrna Loy, 7, riding an ostrich (courtesy of My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning).

Pictures of the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb.

From John T. Noonan’s Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists: “Using an argument which only an English writer would invoke, he [Herbert McCabe, an English Dominican] compared the complex of required acts to the complex of acts necessary to score in a game. Not every single act had to tend toward the goal: the player may be ‘occasionally making a move which is the opposite of the crucial—making a move which if invariably employed would make success impossible.’ On recule pour mieux sauter, both in games and in the preservation of the race, was McCabe’s suggestion.”