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Tag: Personal whimsy
What were you doing on September 11th, 2001?
I was living in Orange County, and I’d already decided to quit my job; I was leaving to come back to Australia in two months. It was a hermetic, unpleasant work environment, and I was already not on speaking terms with my colleagues—over some inconceivably unreal pique. I tended to sleep in; I still do. […]
What’s the hamartia (fatal flaw) in your story?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamartia A good question, and I hope to hear more stories from others. Hamartia is about viewing your life as an Aristotelean tragedy. So, The Decalogue of Nick #2: I’ve trained as a linguist, and I have done computational linguistics stuff by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile Scratch me just a little bit, and […]
To my wife, on our five-year anniversary
My love, whose smile is wide enough to clasp the heavens in; whose sorrow can expend the deep-dug wells of earth; whose anger’s grasp no whisper can unravel; whose amend no benison of rainbows can surpass; whose passion strides where armies never went, and lays what claims it pleases; and whose glass flashes with all […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Late-Night Work Bender
The past few days at work, I’ve been doing one of my favourite work things (information modelling) under my least favourite work circumstances (four-day deadline for what was truly a four-month job)—with all the back history and negotiations and frustrations and blinding insights and occasional outbursts of singing that authoring by committee brings with it. […]