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Category: Personal
While I was away
I: May As if I was the first To sail beyond the west, Fall off the end of Earth, Sink, swim, and gasp for breath. As if no man knew thirst, Before I stopped to rest Beside the spring; or birth, Before I heard of death. Beyond the west: each day A year, each step […]
Will be Stateside next week
Things have continued to be odd around here, to the extent that I haven’t given my tuthree readers adequate notice of this: on Friday, I’m going to the US for a week. I’m spending the weekend in Irvine; then I’m travelling to DC for the ADL Learning Content Registries and Repositories Summit (see my position […]
.sig quoting Marcel Cohen, corrected
My listing of email signatures, from a simpler, Web 1.0 world, has often served as a conversation starter for my friend John Cowan, if I can judge from random googlings (first comment down). The listing includes the following citation of the French-born author Marcel Cohen writing in Judezmo: No saves, Antonyo, lo ka es morirse […]
Elithiolexitherophobia and Coeliomyophilia
(This post hyperlinks to the Old Perseus interface, because the New Perseus interface is unusable and unacceptably slow. Something regrettably common with upgrades…) (This post is rated M for Mmmm… Prurience…) Seen over someone’s shoulder in today’s MX, the daily free publication of Teh Stoopid, which has already occasioned Your Obt Svt’s notice. 2009-10-07, p. […]
Australian Secessionisms
Léo Langlois reasonably asks why on earth I’m obsessing about Quebec (and now Acadia). That’s still a future post, though I’ve dropped hints already in comments. John Cowan reasonably asks why I’m defending federalism, and have I not had dark thoughts of seceding from the Commonwealth of Australia, like New Yorkers had of joining the […]
“Nick Nicholas”
Surnames, they’re a labile thing. Not everywhere is Iceland, where your patronymic lasts a generation; but not everywhere has the self-same string of letters identify a lineage for a millenium, either. Crete switched to a new patronymic suffix en masse, -akis, in the mid-19th century. Well, the Christian Cretans did. The Muslim Cretans didn’t, but […]
20-to-01: Screw You, Channel Nine
There’s plenty a thing I’ve missed by not following network TV in the past decade. There’s plenty more that it’s just as well I’ve missed. My blood boils, my pores distend, my hands wrench into a strangling motion at the shlock, the pettiness, the smugness, the sanctimonious rejoicing at others’ misfortune, the proof of the […]
Bücherdammerung
This should have been more traumatic than it was, but: Saturday I was at my parents’, sorting through my books that had ended up over the years in boxes in their garage, to determine what would stay (and go to my place), and what would be dispensed with. It should have been more traumatic, but […]
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 […]
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, […]