(boing!) Cnoocy Mosque O'Witz

Nabbed from bookishfellow.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

And as did BF, I'm starring the ones sitting unread on my shelf. I'm daggering the ones that lumpybeast has read. Never mind, I'm just daggering the ones I know we have and that she's read. I'm not running up and down the stairs to do this.

( Read more... )

I haven't written huge amounts of text
this week, but unlike last year's Cnoocy, I
at least wrote something. I have spent the time
enjoying life with lumpybeast. I will
say one more thing: I'm very proud to be
a friend of tablesaw. I wish that I
were half as good as he at standing up
to privilege, injustice, and the like.

It's hard to be productive when the wind
is blowing through the window with the air
just cool enough to say "It's still the spring."

O blank verse gods, forgive me: I have rhymed.
Last night I finished up a sonnet I
have been composing for about a year.
Why did it take so long? It's written in
the Rikchik language, which is spoken by
deaf aliens with many tentacles.

It's currently in the revision stage,
but after rikchik finds the many flaws,
(and once I fix them) I will post it here.

(Yes, it's about my love for lumpybeast.)

Today was a vacation day for real.
We had a lazy morning here at home,
and then we took the bus to Cambridgeside,
where lumpybeast acquired for herself
a hoodie and an iPod (both quite cute).
And then we took a walk around the park
and then I finished something that I'll talk
about tomorrow. Good night, reading folks!

Today was reading, napping, and TV.
Tomorrow I will have more verse for you.

Well, maybe not the rumpus, but at least
a post to say that even though I'm just
about to fall asleep, it's time to write
my journal posts in five iambic feet
without a rhyme. That is, in verse that's blank.

Blank Verse Blog Week starts this Sunday! This is a week for blogging entirely in blank verse. I'll be on vacation from work, so hopefully I will participate more than I did last year.

Verse FAQ
Prose FAQ

In his post about the new squidpunk anthology, John Scalzi mentioned that he's written an ode in Ionic Hexameter. A few people misread that as "Ironic Hexameter", including Steven Gould, who claimed to "REALLY WANT" to read something in this meter.

Well, I couldn't leave a request like that sitting on the table,* so here goes.

I'm very good at writing sonnets, as you see,
Observing ev'ry rule of this poetic form.
My verse is always metrical, and never free;
I never violate a long-establish'd norm.
My teachers told me, "Don't attempt to make a change
In something that has lasted through the centuries."
So I've made sure my lines are full of nothing strange
That might cause puzzlement, confusion, or unease.
I rhyme the verses as Elizabethans rhyme,
Three interlocking quatrains and a final pair.
My iambs march in perfectly consistent time,
And ev'ry syllable is placed with greatest care.
The sonnet is the form at which I most excel,
And this one is the proof that I can write them well.


(Thanks to tahnan for proofreading.)
* Especially from a talented author whose books illustrate that the dangers of the supernatural are nothing compared to the perils of interpersonal relationships and federal agents.

1. Found an equation that will cause my cell phone's calculator to freeze and reboot the entire phone (Samsung Stripe, (2^1024)^1.5)
2. Taught Jeffrey Rowland the word "zarf"

I bet jadelennox that "More Than Words" is the skeeziest song ever to be #1 on the Billboard charts. If you like, please guess which song made me hand over the money, no questions asked, without even having a working definition of "skeezy".

ETA: figured out by prog!

I've been participating some in the discussions of authorial intent occasioned by J. K. Rowling's statements this weekend. In one of my comments on the subject, I came up with what I think is a useful turn of phrase that jadelennox told me was worth blogging:

"The creator told me it works this way" is no more a valid excuse for bad literary analysis than it is for bad science.

19² * 4 + 1 = 17² * (4 + 1)

Some of you are at least amateur pirate scholars, so can you tell me: is there a particular significance to a skull-and-crossbones flag flown upside down?

Does anyone have any advice on picking a preschool? A friend asked and I have no idea.

Under pressure from a growing group of people, the Anti-Defamation League has changed its position on whether the massacres of Armenians in the early 20th century were genocide:
http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Mise_00/5114_00.htm
There's certainly reasons to be dissatisfied with the statement, but it's a big change, which started a week or so ago in a town meeting in Watertown. The Boston Globe has been following the story. It's amazing to watch these things happen.

From saxikath among others.
I will send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment on my blog requesting to join this PIF exchange. I don’t know what that gift will be yet, but you will receive it within 365 days. The only thing you have to do in return is “pay it forward” by making the same agreement on your blog.

I have been a hermit lately, not communicating well about social engagements and just in general being hard to get in touch with. This is the result of an astonishingly busy period at work and is not a permanent situation. Thank you to all my friends for being patient with me.

Apparently Ray Bradbury has been saying that Fahrenheit 451 is not a book about censorship, but one about television. And everyone is up in arms about it trying to prove that he once said different.

Can I just say it doesn't matter? If there was ever a clear piece of evidence that the author is not the ultimate authority on a work, it's right here. Stop paying attention to Bradbury and talk about the book. Talk about the book as an anti-censorship work. Don't rebut Bradbury in terms of his brain. It's kind of his turf, so it's not going to go well for you.

I notice that a lot of the people commenting on this are themselves authors, so maybe they have trouble letting go of their own, um, authority. If you're an author, learn to be one of many readers of the book you've written. Find and read Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's "Pharaoh's Daughter" because she's an author who gets it.

I am continuing to read through the Etymologies of St. Isidore of Seville off and on: I'm on the twelfth book of twenty. Sometimes I'm surprised by how modern he is: apparently the term "ant lion" is more than 1300 years old.
And then there's the times I'm surprised in the other direction. XII:vi:3:

Amphibia sunt quaedam genera piscium, dicta eo quod ambulandi in terris usum et natandi in aquis officium habeant. Ἀμφὶ enim Graece utrumque dicitur, id est quia et in aquis et in terris vivunt: ut phocae, corcodilli, hippopotami, hoc est equi fluviales.

Amphibians are certain kinds of fish, so called because they have the task of walking on land and swimming in water. For ἀμφὶ means "both" in Greek, i.e. because they live both in water and on land: such as seals, crocodiles, and hippos, these being river horses.

It's really impressive how much he knows and how differently he views the world.