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Month: April 2009
Andy Burns to poker smokers
MX is a free give-away newspaper in Melbourne. It is published by the same mob as the Herald-Sun—but its vocabulary is even simpler. Its sentences are really short. Its paragraphs are short too. Like this. It also has lame-ass punning headlines—much like this post about a piece by Andy Burns. It’s light reading meant to […]
rur rur rur
Fishing for links to Greek linguistics blogs on my own Greek linguistics blog, I fell across this Catherine Tate sketch (for the second time) via Λογογράμματα: Hominid @ Λογογράμματα‘s comment was: Στους αγγλόφωνους, τουλάχιστον, οι υπόλοιπες γλώσσες δεν ακούγονται μόνο σαν βαρ, βαρ, βαρ… Ho esti methermēneuomenon: For Anglophones, at least, other languages don’t just […]
Mr Bach has an off day
The good thing with having a complete collection of an artist’s works is, you get to hear their crap works as well as their masterpieces. In fact the crap works throw their masterpieces into relief. Masterpieces do sprezzatura to excess: they sound effortless and inevitable. It’s only when you see how art can go awry […]
Death of the Library as I knew it
Extended radio silence, dear readers, has been in part because I was putting some work into my Greek linguistics blog, including finally getting round to typing in the various redactions of the Greek verses of Rumi and Sultan Walad. In part, it was because I spent some library time with theologians (unrelated to the preceding […]
Pseudo-Chrysostom: Catechetical sermon on Easter
Leafing through the Holy Synopsis (the summary of movable feast services), I find that in leaving on the dot when John Damascene’s Canon started for offal and eggs, I had also been missing out on a lovely sermon by John Chrysostom, wedged in after the bible readings. The Synopsis groused that the sermon was intended […]
Good Saturday Tomato Soup
So yes, I don’t know what the Anglo-Catholic for Good Saturday is. It’s simpler in Orthodoxy, where each day of Holy Week is Great: Great Monday, Great Tuesday, Great Wednesday. And each day of Holy Week matters: Orthodoxy has a well-ordered liturgical calendar around Holy Week. The Office of the Bridegroom on Great Monday, the […]
Western Orthodoxy
It struck me, as a Greek-Australian kid reading Shakespeare, that English used to be a more Mediterranean language than it is now. Which is to say, the society reflected in the language of Shakespeare had more in common with the traditional Greek culture I caught the very tail end of, than did the Australia I […]
Nick makes the local paper
‘Twas two weeks ago, or maybe three, that as I made my daily walk to Oakleigh Railway Station, to go to work for the day, I saw three people arrayed at the entrance of the station. There was a girl, standing and smiling awkwardly; a woman, holding a clipboard and looking officious; and a man, […]
Return of the Chantry
I’m still here; I had the ill luck to fall… ill last week (abed Wednesday and Thursday), and spent the long weekend either doing Greek lemmatisation, or socialising. I’ve tried combining the two, it doesn’t work. I’ve opened up my Greek linguistics blog, in reaction to a post my friend George forwarded me. I don’t […]
Scythians
From the Suda On-Line project I contribute to, a cloyingly heartwarming anecdote from the historian Phylarchus: The Scythians, when they were about to lie down to sleep, brought the quiver, and if they happened to have passed that day unharmed, they placed a white pebble on the quiver, but if [things had gone] troublesomely, [they […]