Purchase Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or The Diamond Age from Fictionwise by credit card, and get a 100% Micropay rebate, good for anything they sell.  Offer good through September 8th.

As usual, I will quote from Michael Quinion’s irreplaceable World Wide Words column, this time from issue 348 (Saturday 5 July 2003):

“English, whatever its other merits, has as many disparaging words
as one would possibly desire. The example that follows is from Sir
Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 translation of Rabelais’ work Gargantua and
Pantagruel, a translation that draws heavily on vocabulary used in
Scotland in his [Urquhart's] time:

“The bun-sellers or cake-makers were in nothing inclinable
to their request; but, which was worse, did injure them
most outrageously, called them prattling gabblers, lickorous
gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed
scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers,
slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts,
cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering
companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks,
scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs,
idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish
grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish
loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers,
lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock
slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons,
turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory
epithets; saying further, that it was not for them to eat
of these dainty cakes, but might very well content themselves
with the coarse unranged bread, or to eat of the great brown
household loaf.”

Have fun working all of these into casual sentences, or just tracking down the meanings of all these insults.  I’ll get you started: a  sychophant-varlet is a servile, flattering servant or rascal.  A blockish grutnol is a dull, lazy person.&nbp; A woodcock slangam is a lanky person as dim-witted as a pheasant (Google for slangam and you encounter a fascinating academic paper entitled A cultural-linguistic study of English sound-symbolic pejorative lexemes beginning in sl- and du-.  As long as you have your dictionary out already, it’s worth a read: just look for definitions that begin ‘Ling. -‘.)  A doddipol-jolthead seems to be a blockhead-blockhead, which suggests that there has been a great deal of linguistic compression of various insults into fewer terms.  I have the misfortune of encountering quite a few drunken roysters (revelers), drowsy loiterers, and jeering companions, and I am commonly treated as a paltry customer, although less frequently since the local Wherehouse Music stores have closed.  I have been mostly able to avoid staring clowns and forlorn snakes.  Just apply some effort: I’m sure you can work shite-a-bed scoundrel into today’s conversations with minimal effort.

The source work for these words, Gargantua and Pantagruel, inspired the English word Gargantuan, which is defined by one source as “Characteristic of Gargantua, a gigantic, wonderful personage; enormous; prodigious; inordinate.”  The author, François Rabelais (1494-1553), has also given rise to an English word, Rabelaisian, used to describe wildly obscene humor (take, for instance, Gargantua’s discussion of how best to wipe one’s arse, the final decision being the neck of a live goose, leading me to wonder if a few centuries will turn South Park into fine literature.)  If this is intriguing to you, BookFinder lists a range of copies of Gargantua, from a $0.50 Penguin mass market paperback to a charming 1708 octavo edition, containing the translation above, in calfskin with gilt lettering for £1100 (about $1800.)  If you beat me to it you can have a $50 limited edition on hand-made paper; I’m checking to see if it contains Urquhart’s translation.

The PowellsBooks newsletter has a bizarre and addictive feature called, and I’m quoting this literally, “Fup. Store Cat.”  Yes, the periods included.  As far as I can gather, Fup is the name of their store cat; that’s a picture to the right.  “Fup. Store Cat.” is like a train wreck: you can’t quite pull your eyes away, even if you want to.  You see, every newsletter presents a new “chapter” (just a couple hundred words) about Fup’s adventures.  In each chapter Fup, joined by compatriots Bear, Zooey, and Wiggums, adventure their way through unwieldy prose:

Let’s follow a path in the sun,” Bear purrs.

“There are no paths in the sun,” Wiggums reminds him.  “You’re sitting in the last patch of sun we’re liable to find for three days.”

Up and up the fir trees go, so far beyond the leafy pockets nearer to the ground that there’s no telling where they stop. Their tops end somewhere in the sky, is about all you can safely say.

“We could climb until we’re above the tree line,” Fup suggests, “but that would be an odd thing to do, seeing as it’s trees we’re looking for.”

“Trees you’re looking for?” someone says.

Fup looks at Bear.  Then Fup and Bear both look at Wiggums.  An echo would be the most natural explanation, except that they hadn’t noticed an echo before.

Fup repeats herself, but a little louder this time: “Trees we’re looking for.”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

Down by the creek, Zooey begins to growl.

They search the woods around them, but it’s like trying to find fish in a deep lake, Fup realizes, staring into the tangle of leaves and branches.  She notices for the first time how loud the bird chatter has become — or had she not been listening before?  She can’t see a single bird for all the leaves and branches, but suddenly birds are all she can hear.

Each time the newsletter arrives, I’m presented with my WTF moment for the day.

The Tuesday, 29 April 2003 edition of Terry Gross’s peerless Fresh Air is very much worth listening to.  Diane Ravitch discusses her new book Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (the next book I plan to read), and linguist Geoff Nunberg discusses, in a captivating under-six-minutes essay, the stylistic differences between left-wing and right-wing authors (you’ll also learn the word polysyndeton, unless you are far too educated and know it already.)

Fictionwise eBooks, as discussed on my Best of the Web page, is a vast bookstore of electronic texts.  Creation by Jeffrey Ford is a great story, a Hugo nominee, and free for a limited time.  Demons and Dragons by Jim Razzi is $0.42 and really, really bad.

Spider Robinson’s Hugo-winning science fiction story “Melancholy Elephants” can (rather ironically) be found online.  It’s quite good.

I’ve yet to decide whether I really like Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel.  However, I have to admit there are few chapter titles in the world I like more than “Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle”.

I stumbled upon a collection of September 11 cartoons, some of which are quite touching.  One is a very simple picture of Uncle Sam on a couch, his top hat beside him, bent over and weeping into his hands.  Another simple cartoon shows a fireman in a soiled fire jacket with a Superman ‘S’ sewn on the back.  One cartoon has two kids trading cards; one says, “I’ll trade you two Michael Jordans and a Barry Bonds for one New York Fireman.”

A stirring cartoon shows the American eagle sitting on a stool with a determined look, holding a file, and sharpening his talons.  Another shows the moon with Earth in the distance; you see the plume of smoke coming out of New York, and the U.S. flag on the moon at half mast.  The final one I’ll mention shows a tree and a corner of a driveway.  The text reads:

There’s a small corner of my driveway at home that I often find myself staring at.

It’s where this guy I knew, Pat Danahy, sat in his car for well over an hour with the engine running.  He refused to get out because it was cold that morning, and his little girl was asleep in her car-seat and he couldn’t bear to wake her.

The last anybody saw of him, he was helping his co-workers evacuate their offices at Fiduciary Trust near the top of the World Trade Center.

Like I said, I stare at that spot a lot.

They are worth checking out.

The site Women in Refrigerators discusses the phenomenon of the superheroine tortured/raped/murdered/depowered in comic books.  A fascinating read, even if (like me) you are not really a reader of comics.

Thanks for MeFi for the link.

I have written a response to a newspaper article but decided that it

1. probably was not worth my effort to write it, and
2. almost certainly is not worth anyone’s effort to read it.

So I will just say, “good grief, some people are morons (and I don’t even read them.)”

Here is a list of the ten most frequent four-word phrases in the King James Bible:

This is the sort of thing that would have taken years of scholarship even forty years ago, and yet I created this in less than one minute on a notebook PC (Clarification added 06 February 2002: It took less than a minute to run.  It took somewhat longer to write the script.  But not years longer.)  I used a home-baked Perl script to do this.  Perl can stand for “Practical Extraction and Report Language”; see why?

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is dedicated to the memory of the author who gave us the passage “It was a dark and stormy night.”  The contest, held annually, solicits contributions of bad opening sentences to hypothetical novels.  Here are three of my favorites from the 2001 contest.

The graphic crime-scene photo that stared up at Homicide Inspector Chuck Venturi from the center of his desk was not a pretty picture, though it could have been, Chuck mused, had it only been shot in soft focus with a shutter speed of 1/125 second at f 5.6 or so.

         - Rephah Berg

Virgule gazed across the vast, cold, steel expanse past his inquisitor to
witness the full consequence of his previous decision – feral, withered
children, in tattered, filthy garments, toiled mindlessly at his command in
a single chamber which reeked of oil and burning animal flesh – his time
had come to deliver the final instruction; “Yes! I would like fries with that.”

         - Ed Reffle

Terry the Tarantula and Wendy the Wasp were frolicking and cavorting
together in the Flowery Meadow, (as they were the best of friends in all
the Enchanted Forest of Miggly-Wompsly) when, all of a sudden, and with no
warning whatsoever, Wendy accidentally stabbed Terry with her stinger,
making her very sad for she knew that soon her poison would paralyze her
friend and after a while her eggs would hatch inside him, and then her
happy wriggling larva would slowly eat him alive, but Terry tried to smile
and would have told her not to be sad as this was how the Circle of Life
was continued, but he was in too much pain and, as I mentioned before,
paralyzed.

         - Delano Lopez

As it is Burns Night, I have been passing some quiet time reading my Burns’s Complete Poetical Works, a nice Riverside Press volume from 1897 (Some day the world will realize that late-nineteenth century Riverside Press editions are excellent and far underpriced, and the prices will be increased accordingly.  Right now they are fantastic deals; keep your eyes open for them.)

I want to share three passages.  The first consists of stanzas VII and VIII from Man Was Made To Mourn, in which the narrator of the poem is listening to the story of an octogenarian walking along the bank of a river:

"Many and sharp the num'rous ills
  Inwoven with our frame !
More pointed still we make ourselves
  Regret, remorse, and shame!
And Man, whose heav'n-erected face
  The smiles of love adorn,--
Man's inhumanity to man
  Makes countless thousands mourn !

"See yonder poor, o'erlabour'd wight,
  So abject, mean, and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
  To give him leave to toil;
And see his lordly fellow-worm
  The poor petition spurn,
Unmindful, tho' a weeping wife
  And helpless offspring mourn.

Burns, a womaniser and drunkard, was also a very tender-hearted soul who was deeply sympathetic with animals and his fellow man.  I excerpt stanzas II and III from To A Mouse, subtitled on turning her up in her nest with the plough, November, 1785 (the poem The Wounded Hare explores a similar theme.)  I place my translation next to stanza III:

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
                 Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
                 An' fellow mortal !

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;          I doubt not, sometimes you may thieve;
What then ? poor beastie, thou maun live          What then?  Poor beastie, you must live
A daimen icker in a thrave                        An occasional ear of corn from amongst two dozen
                 'S a sma' request;                                Is a small request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,                  I'll get a blessing with the remainder,
                 An' never miss't !                                And never miss it!

For the final selection I’ll lighten the tone with a bit of hilarious derision.  Burns allegedly inscribed this verse in a beautifully bound but badly worm-eaten volume of Shakespeare in a nobleman’s library.  The Book-Worms:

Through and through th' ispired leaves,
  Ye maggots, make your windings;
But O, respect his lordship's taste,
  And spare the golden bindings !

Happy Burns Night!

Modern Humorist, a very funny site, ran a feature called Holy Tango of Poetry subtitled “If Poets Wrote Poems Whose Titles Were Anagrams of Their Names”.

One of the poets featured is William Carlos Williams, a founder of the Imagist movement, who is best known (by far) for his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”.  If you have anything even remotely resembling a poetry anthology this is sure to be included because

1.  It is very good

2.  It is historically important

3.  It only takes up about three column inches

It is also notable because

4.  It leads a large number of college freshmen (who do not know the historical context) to decide that the chickens mentioned in the poem could successfully write modern poetry

Here is the poem (I’m sure a number of readers would be able to recite this by heart):

The Red Wheelbarrow

chickens.

Here is Modern Humorist’s Holy Tango poem for William Carlos Williams:

I Will Alarm Islamic Owls

and so dedicated to Allah

I purchased Michael Moore’s Downsize This! tonight and have read the first ten chapters.  In a previous post I tore Moore apart and wondered if “Mr. Moore is just an idiot or if is his aim is more sinister,” in response to his distorted figures and half-truths.  My verdict: he’s an idiot.

Eric Bogosian once described Oliver Stone as being not a liberal, but rather what conservatives want people to think liberals are like.  I cheerfully appropriate this and apply it to Michael Moore.

[I am writing this on my laptop on Tuesday night, but I will not be able to post it until tomorrow (Wednesday).]

Sunday through Wednesday of this week I am in Palo Alto on business.  Today, on my way back to the offices from a recommended lunch spot, I passed a used book store.  Or rather, I attempted to pass a used store, as I have never succeeded in actually walking past one.

I have a few collecting interests in books, among them nineteenth century editions of Concord transcendalists’ texts, books on scotch whisky, and editions of The Oxford Book of Carols.  So I navigated to my standard haunts.  Bell’s Books did not have any Oxford Carols.  It did have a copy of Scotch Made Easy by Wilson, a book I did not know existed; I picked this up (and, as it turns out, overpaid for it.)  One of the employees retrieved a stack of older Emerson and Thoreau texts, with a ladder, from high on a shelf, and I looked through them at the counter.  I found a Riverside Press edition of Emerson’s Essays: Second Series; I remembered that I had a Riverside edition of the First Series, but could not remember which printing (i.e., whether they matched or not.)  I asked them to set the Emerson aside and I would call back after I checked my online book collection.

So this story now finds me standing at the counter with the Perl Cookbook that I brought in, Scotch Made Easy, and a book of Emerson essays.

“This is a varied selection,” said the clerk as he picked up the scotch book to ring up.  “Scotch, Thoreau [sic], and Perl.  I’m not going to try to figure out the connection.”

I laughed as the oddity struck me.  “Well,” I said, “I have a website about scotch whisky written in Perl.  And of course there is the pleasure of pouring a fine dram while reading Thoreau.”

“And you said you had your book collection online, which is at least a vague connection,” he concluded.

Connections galore.  Perhaps I am not so odd after all.

In redesigning my book collection page this evening, I ran across the need for a routine to sort by Library of Congress call number.  This is actually nontrivial, as the following are all valid numbers:

• DA870.F64
• DK602.3.B76 1996
• Q335.P416 1994
• QA76.73.P22W35 1991
• RS75.P5

To add even more complexity, some number fields are sorted in strict ascending order (e.g., in “DK602.3.B76 1996″ the bold number would come after 9, after 80, after 600 but before 603) and some are sorted as decimals (e.g., in “Q335.P416 1994″ the bold number would come after 3000 and after 35 but before 4161.)  I wrote some Perl code for this, and it understands all call number forms that I am aware of.  If you stumbled upon this page looking for something like this, here it is:

sub locsort ($a,$b)
{
    @a = ($a =~ /^([A-Z]+)(\d+(?:\.\d+)?)\.?([A-Z]*)(\d*)\.?([A-Z]*)(\d*)(?: (\d\d\d\d))?/);
    @b = ($b =~ /^([A-Z]+)(\d+(?:\.\d+)?)\.?([A-Z]*)(\d*)\.?([A-Z]*)(\d*)(?: (\d\d\d\d))?/);

    return
	$a[0] cmp $b[0]
	    ||
	$a[1] <=> $b[1]
	    ||
	$a[2] cmp $b[2]
	    ||
	"0.$a[3]" <=> "0.$b[3]"
	    ||
	$a[4] cmp $b[4]
	    ||
	"0.$a[5]" <=> "0.$b[5]"
	    ||
	$a[6] <=> $b[6]
	    ;
}

I am pleased.  I spent most of today (Sunday) installing a wall of new bookshelves that I purchased at IKEA.  These Billy bookcases are a fantastic bargain: at 79 inches (2.0 m) in height with six shelves apiece they provide ample space.  The four cost only $430 combined and provide sixty linear feet (18.3 m) of storage space, not counting the cabinet tops.  This means that there is actually some unfilled space!  I would love to post a picture, but I cannot find the serial cable for my digital camera. 

Dempster [...] said, “We have hardly a right to abuse this tragedy ["Elvira"]; for bad as it is, how vain should either of us be to write one not near so good.”  JOHNSON.  ”Why no, Sir; this is not just reasoning.  You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one.  You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table.  It is not your trade to make tables.”

(The Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell.  Page 257, Everyman’s Library Edition.)

It is hard to believe that it is after midnight now.  There just doesn’t seem to be enough time to do everything I want to do these days.  This is mostly a good thing: there are a lot of activities that interest me at the moment, so I am never at a loss for something to do and enjoy.  Here is a list of activities I have wanted to pursue in the past couple of days, only a subset of which have been accomplished or attempted.

1. Play with Cakewalk.  Use it to record some of my musical compositions, with multiple vocal and instrumental tracks.
2. Order more stamps from Iowa Stamps & Coins for my ongoing (but unnamed) philatelic art project.  Work on the art project.  Transfer the pieces to a new album.
3. Work on a redesign of mcgees.org.
4. Install the new printer that has been sitting on my floor, in a box, since the day after Christmas.
5. Play some more with the new TiVo.
6. Watch some of the movies recorded by it.
7. Listen to my new CDs from Christmas.
8. Research the sport of fencing.
9. Add advertising to ScotchFinder (the advertisers are arranged, I just need to do some re-coding of the site.)  Add the ability to search the database via a toll-free telephone number.
10. Research whale deafness.
11. Continue reading The Annotated Alice, Infinite Jest, and The Life of Samuel Johnson.
12. Research PocketPCs, potentially to buy one soon.
13. Make hotel reservations for the UK trip.
14. Search Fresh Air archives.
15. Buy add-ons to the hamster habitats.
16. Clean my study.
17. Reinstall Microsoft Visual Studio at home from my CDs, which I haven’t done since my hard drive crashed.

These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  (You probably think some of these are fake, thrown in for humor.  That is not the case.  Even the whale one.)  Implicitly on the list, of course, is to write about the activities in this ‘blog.

My makeshift way of dealing with the situation has been to get 5.5 hours of sleep per night.  I think this is beginning to take a toll.  It’s getting close to 12:30.  I will probably go watch half an hour of “Antiques Roadshow” on TiVo, pour a malt, maybe scoop a bit of Ben and Jerry’s (which is, by the way, now the most popular tourist attraction in Vermont.  Yikes.)

More descriptions of the activities on the list will follow, as time permits.  I have found that it is frequently easier to write about one’s experiences doing something after one has already done the something.  Wish me luck for making the time.

I finished Author Unknown earlier this evening.  I have an index card (5″ x 8″, not 5″ x 7″, as I mentioned before) with notes ready for my write-up:

(Granted, my handwriting is not so great in general.  But in partial defense of its particular hideousness here, let me state for the record that most of these notes were scrawled without the assistance of desk, table, or any flat writing surface whatsoever.)

One of the hamsters bit me tonight.  It was not an angry or scared bite, it was a simple “is this thing food?” bite.  He was sniffing my hand, then reached up and grabbed my index finger, opened his mouth, and took a tiny chunk right off the front of it.  Their teeth are amazingly sharp; the bite felt like the pinch one gets when exercising insufficient caution playing with small rare earth magnets.