Number 123
The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC is a good resource, including a site for children. Rod T. turned me on to an anti-chain letter and spam site called Break the Chain, which gave an award to this Shakespearish sonnet:
by Anonymous
These several airy unnamed messengers
Do daily cram my inbox bursting full;
And with a battery of promises
(Of manhood's lengthening, safe and natural;
Of sites whereat strange couplings may be seen,
Or beauties nubile as the law allows;
Of meetings with old schoolmates, none of whom
I've spared a brace of thoughts for these ten years)
Make sifting out my correspondences
A passing trial. O, take care, my friends!
The rambling jest you send has like been seen
Ten times, forwarded by some jackanapes;
And sooth, I'll not contribute to a chain
But risk the lapse in fortunes an I don't.
Of all conveniences, these are most meet:
The Bulk folder, "Select All," and "Delete."
Recently Alexander McCall Smith spoke at a local bookstore promoting the newest entry in his Botswana series, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies. He also has two other book series. He is a charming and humorous man, and if he comes to a bookstore near you, go hear him, whether or not you read his books.
He told a chicken story, which can be found on the web site, which brought to mind another chicken story I heard earlier that week, which put me in mind of a couple more chicken stories I heard from my cousin Larry. This series of three chicken stories in my life is more than coincidence, but what can chickens mean to me just now? Smith jokingly said that he intends to include more scenes about cake in his books because a reader asked him to. Years ago Tim S. (I think it was) asked me why I liked Agatha Christie books, and I jokingly said because I like to read about elaborate teas. He thought I said "keys", and that it must be hard finding such stories. Either way it's a specialized literary taste, and I was pleased to find that others like to read about people having cake and tea (in Botswana, it's red bush tea).
Smith said his earliest and most important stylistic influence was the old Book of Common Prayer from the Anglican church. He also said the lyrical quality of the language in the Botswana books stems partly from the fact that the African characters speak grammatically correct English, the language of their formal education.
Temple Grandin is an autistic woman with a Ph.D. in animal science whose latest book, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, is about how animals think. We think in words, they think visually, she says. Grandin has so much empathy with animals that she designed cattle chutes to make their movement in stockyards ~ to their deaths, usually ~ less stressful. Aldous Huxley, who was legally blind much of his life, wrote that he had difficulty forming mental images. It might be a useful exercise to try to think only in pictures for five minutes, or only in words without pictures. Hard to control.
Another experiment in the novel form is out now by a young writer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, with a 9-year-old narrator writing about 9/11. I ran across two reviews of it. The novel has a flip book on some pages, a drawing of a body floating up beside a tower. Two and a half pages are filled with numbers. And so on. Not so hard to understand, but it sounds too irritating to read. The review by B. R. Myers, "A Bag of Tired Tricks: Blank pages? Photos of mating tortoises? The death throes of the postmodern world" (Atlantic, May 2005), says, "For decades, we readers have been urged, though not in so many words, to suspend our cultural literacy. . . . The hoariest plot, the tritest message ~ these become acceptably highbrow as long as everything is tossed out in shreds that the readers, mentally falling on hands and knees, must piece together."
Recently I ran across a collection of letters between Thomas Merton and Robert Lax, A Catch of Anti-Letters (cache?), which I also couldn't/wouldn't/didn't read; too full of personal jokes and allusions, but this is allowable between friends, who were indeed super-literate. Merton's other work is quite lucid to the average reader.
Advanced Price (Tickets)
Should be "advance price". You are paying in advance, the price is not advanced, which wouldn't make sense.
When to End with a Preposition
"We're all aware of what a newspaper consists." The speaker got confused. Two phrases here require "of": aware of and consists of. One can't do the job of both, as can easily be seen if we substitute another phrase requiring a different preposition, for example, "I am talking about what a newspaper consists of." Or eliminate one prepositional phrase: "We all know of what a newspaper consists."
Sign Painter Needed
At a gas station: "Out of gas. Truck do in soon." Shortly after Fred spotted that sign, I heard someone on the radio say "undos" (un-duze) meaning "undoes." A natural, but wrong, conjugation of "undo."
Incredible
"That's not a credulous point." The speaker meant "credible". A point may be credible, or believable. A person may be credulous, or too easily believing.
Proclivity
A politician said, "It is my proclivity to . . ." something or other, which means he has a tendency toward something, but what he was trying to say was that he has a particular opinion about one specific issue. "Proclivity" is a natural inclination or tendency.
The movie The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reminded me that the online translator (see below) Babelfish was named for the fish in the book that galactic travelers insert into their ears to translate any language. Beats an earworm.
Painted on a van spotted east of Boston: MobileLawUSA.
When I saw a movie listing of Masseur Ichi on the Road, I thought I'd spotted a typo, but in fact there is a series of Japanese movies about a blind masseur / swordsman.
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