nyam-nyam - Fulbe, to eat (and later the name given to cannibal tribes)
[With thanks to Ibn Battuta.]
Tuesday 27 March 2012
Tuesday 20 March 2012
My favourite Twitter SPAM so far (2)
Juliana Mccorison @Juliana_Mccoris
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing
My favourite Twitter SPAM so far (1)
That awkward moment at a feminist picnic when they realize no one made sandwiches
Ulysses, reviewed (or, Squaddie banter III)
I heard Germaine Greer say it was the greatest book ever written and vowed then never to find out.
- Charles 'Chucky' Stephenson, illiterate
Sunday 18 March 2012
Words can kill
There are a million car bumpers loose on the streets of the city which can show you just what a good noun is capable of.- Carlos María Domínguez, The Paper House
Cool thing to do on a rainy afternoon
Friday 16 March 2012
Metaphor = truth
It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue: but the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet's perception, the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness.
- George Oppen, courtesy of The Paris Review
The word 'plash'
really pisses me off.
It's just 'splash', isn't it, with a silent S tacked on, to make it seem more onomatopoetical.
Auden, Heaney, Foulds... this is your gypsy's warning.
It's just 'splash', isn't it, with a silent S tacked on, to make it seem more onomatopoetical.
Auden, Heaney, Foulds... this is your gypsy's warning.
The justification for truth
We are free to choose our paths- WH Auden, 'Aubade'
but choose We must, no matter
where they lead, and the tales We
tell of the Past must be true.
Funny(!)
Karl Minns @karlminns
Writing a musical about the history of the exclamation mark. It's called !!
Article of faith
I'm a true believer in the separation of Church and baser instincts like hypocrisy, power, exploitation of innocence.- Ken Russell, on The Devils (in his final article for The Times)
Less impressive, admittedly, is when he describes the friction between Cardinal Richelieu (yes, The) and 'French King Louis III', a man who had predeceased Richelieu by some 750 years.
Wednesday 14 March 2012
I, me, ouch!, mine
The I-feeling: a feeling of being-responsible-for. (It cannot accompany a verb in the passive.) I wake in the morning with a violent headache and cry Ouch! This cry is devoid of I-feeling. Then I think : - "I have a hangover"; some I-feeling accompanies this thought - the act of locating and identifying the headache is mine - but very little. Then I think: - "I drank too much last night." Now the I-feeling is much stronger...- WH Auden, 'Dichtung und Wahrheit'
[*horror!*]
Charlotte Ledger @girl_on_a_ledge
@MargaretAtwood Mills&Boon are at rally against library funding cuts in London today. Please retweet to show your support! #savelibraries
Monday 12 March 2012
Bartlet v Nixon
In Series 3, episode 12 of The West Wing, Jed Bartlett gives his staff a motivational speech:
A president stood up. He said, "We will land a man on the moon in the next ten years." ... and we did it.What Bartlett doesn't tell them is that President Nixon (for twas indeed he) was subsequently in receipt of a memo from speech-writer William Safire, outlining what he should say if that man did not come back. This surprisingly moving - if retrospectively-fictionalised - document can be read here, thanks to the splendid archival website Letters of Note.
It's a wonderful Liff
I am indebted to whichever anonymous Wikicontributors for the following gems concerning the late Douglas Adams and The Meaning of Liff:
- The original definition of Liff, as contained in The Meaning of Liff, is 'A book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover. For instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words, "This book will change your life."' Which, of course, The Meaning of Liff does. (Does have it on the cover, I mean. It may also change your life.)
- a) In the revised and updated edition of the book - The Deeper Meaning of Liff - the definition of the titular Liff is different. b) It now means a phenomenon for which there is no word.
- There is a German version.
Oh, for fuck's sake!
Who, even on a mere blog, could manage to write this without realising that the caption is obviously 'Diamonds art forever'?
G'damn...
G'damn...
Clarification [priority: URGENT]
The new Norwegian Bible translation is by no means a rush job.- Frode Helland, Fonts In Use magazine
... and other lines I did not expect to read this Monday morning.
Metafor Lanka: #813
Sri Lanka is a private bus where the driver has not come yet, and the conductor drives at high speed.- Priyankarage Bandula Jayaweera
[With thanks to IS.]
A million little James Freys
The book is billed as “memoir written as fiction”, which, as far as I can work out, means that it’s fiction.
- Philip Womack in The New Humanist, on Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Death In The Family
A reasonable point, though clearly not what that means. Still, nobody to blame but the publisher for letting such a dicey descriptor make it onto the shelves. (I predict at least one lawsuit.)
Thursday 8 March 2012
Magnificent valour!
Truly splendid biog
Crispian Jago writes the 2011 Orwell Prize Longlisted blog, Science, Reason and Critical Thinking where he waves a shitty stick in the general direction of Irrational Nonsense. He is the vice president of the Hampshire Skeptics Society and co-convenor of Winchester Skeptics in the Pub. He is a compulsive record collector and when he doesn't have any spare time, he's a Freelance IT consultant.as found attached to this article, from the Spectator.
Turning over a new ola leaf
Herewith, a page from the Sri Lankan ordinances concerning vagrants, persons deemed 'incorrigible rogues' and those of 'youthful bad character'.
Let it be noted that these ordinances pertain to the present.
Let it also be noted that my two years in Colombo set me back, in total, slightly under a fiver.
[With thanks to MT.]
Let it be noted that these ordinances pertain to the present.
Let it also be noted that my two years in Colombo set me back, in total, slightly under a fiver.
[With thanks to MT.]
Wednesday 7 March 2012
Baroness Orczy - in context
They seek him here, they seek him there (this was pre-Google, obviously)...
Better -
At first glance, I thought this was a punctuation gag:
Jack Dee @TheRealJackDee
Sorry about that. as I was saying, went for a curry last ni... sorry, better dash
Coldplay and me
I am amused to read - in this article wot I found down the back of the internet - that Coldplay regret calling their last album Mylo Xyloto, not because it's stupid (which it is) but because it confuses the punters and is made up of "two words that you couldn't even google."
1) The journalist, Tim Jonze, concludes, entertainingly, that this is not actually true. Even more amusingly, a Google search for these two words [Ahhh... Was Chris Martin perpetrating a terribly clever bluff?] reveals plenty of results, foremost among which being Martin's insistence that it won't. There's even a guide to pronunciation, for those not classically trained in pop-gobbledygook.
2) As Jonze highlights, in fact, if you type in 'Mylo Xyloto', you're very unlikely to come up with much else. I had an editor a few years back who gave me no end of shit over my decision to write as 'ASH Smyth', rather than 'Adam' (principally, I suspect, because his layout monkeys had terrible difficulties remembering that my name was not actually 'Ash'). Try typing both into Google, and see what happens.
1) The journalist, Tim Jonze, concludes, entertainingly, that this is not actually true. Even more amusingly, a Google search for these two words [Ahhh... Was Chris Martin perpetrating a terribly clever bluff?] reveals plenty of results, foremost among which being Martin's insistence that it won't. There's even a guide to pronunciation, for those not classically trained in pop-gobbledygook.
2) As Jonze highlights, in fact, if you type in 'Mylo Xyloto', you're very unlikely to come up with much else. I had an editor a few years back who gave me no end of shit over my decision to write as 'ASH Smyth', rather than 'Adam' (principally, I suspect, because his layout monkeys had terrible difficulties remembering that my name was not actually 'Ash'). Try typing both into Google, and see what happens.
Sunday 4 March 2012
Inconstancy, thy name is 'Middleteon'
An article on Page 34 this weekend about London and Londoners misspells the surname of a member of the royal family at one point. As the article correctly notes elsewhere, she is Kate Middleton, not Middleteon.
- New York Times magazine
Awful. The worst kind of wrong. (And surely she's not anymore, anyway.)
Revelation
I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.
- Revelation 2:21
Still, what can you do.
Riddle me stat.
Who was the last player to score a try in each of his 3 first 5 or 6 Nations matches?- John Inverdale, France-Ireland
Saturday 3 March 2012
Friday 2 March 2012
12 out of 50 of the 'coolest' books (EVER!!)
Here, according to Shortlist.com are the 50 coolest books in existence.
By which they, of course, mean novels. All but two written in English (I include Trainspotting). All but one written after WW2.
Of which I have read approx. 12. To wit (and in Shortlist's order):
I make no apology for the remainder, nor any judgement on the issue of 'cool'. The caveats and small print one might apply to such a list, however (any list of this nature, but this one in particular), would/probably ought to include books I regret bothering with (Naked Lunch); books that have certainly deterred me from reading anything else by the same author (Lot 49) and/or books I have no intention of reading (Dice Man, Fear of Flying, Neuromancer, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Wasp Factory, Morvern Callar, The Secret History); authors I have persevered with but whose books turn out all to be remarkably similar (Kerouac, Coupland); authors not represented here by their best work (Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, HST); authors by whom I have read other works (Hemingway, Calvino, Heller, Ballard, Amis, Bukowski, Murakami, Orwell, Capote, Wolfe, Franzen, Chabon, DeLillo); and books I have consumed, instead, as film (American Psycho, Clockwork Orange, Perfume, One Flew..., Nineteen Eighty-Four, and - if it can be counted - Howl).
By which they, of course, mean novels. All but two written in English (I include Trainspotting). All but one written after WW2.
Of which I have read approx. 12. To wit (and in Shortlist's order):
On The Roadand halves of Middlesex and The Crying of Lot 49.
Naked Lunch
Slaughter-House-Five
Generation X
A Confederacy of Dunces
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Trainspotting
Fight Club
Watchmen
The Great Gatsby
I make no apology for the remainder, nor any judgement on the issue of 'cool'. The caveats and small print one might apply to such a list, however (any list of this nature, but this one in particular), would/probably ought to include books I regret bothering with (Naked Lunch); books that have certainly deterred me from reading anything else by the same author (Lot 49) and/or books I have no intention of reading (Dice Man, Fear of Flying, Neuromancer, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Wasp Factory, Morvern Callar, The Secret History); authors I have persevered with but whose books turn out all to be remarkably similar (Kerouac, Coupland); authors not represented here by their best work (Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, HST); authors by whom I have read other works (Hemingway, Calvino, Heller, Ballard, Amis, Bukowski, Murakami, Orwell, Capote, Wolfe, Franzen, Chabon, DeLillo); and books I have consumed, instead, as film (American Psycho, Clockwork Orange, Perfume, One Flew..., Nineteen Eighty-Four, and - if it can be counted - Howl).
History repeating
The New Republic Er, well, almost by definition, surely...?@tnr
Obama's re-election campaign is looking like a repeat of 2008
Thursday 1 March 2012
Why hyphens are important
as proven, here, admittedly, by omission:
Though how they think they're going to bring back David Foster Wallace...
Two star novelists, Nathan Englander and Zadie Smith, on bringing back wrong and right, micro and macro writing, and David Foster Wallace- Guernica
Though how they think they're going to bring back David Foster Wallace...
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