About

I'm Mike Pope. I live in the Seattle area. I've been a technical writer and editor for over 35 years. I'm interested in software, language, music, movies, books, motorcycles, travel, and ... well, lots of stuff.

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If you ever wonder if you will regret not having gone fishing with your dad, shut up and make it happen.

Dusty Scott



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Blog Statistics

Dates
First entry - 6/27/2003
Most recent entry - 9/4/2024

Totals
Posts - 2655
Comments - 2677
Hits - 2,693,567

Averages
Entries/day - 0.34
Comments/entry - 1.01
Hits/day - 348

Updated every 30 minutes. Last: 3:31 PM Pacific


  12:04 AM

Long ago, someone was looking through my books and remarked that I had a lot of "noun books." Oranges by John McPhee, for example, or Genius by James Gleick. Once it was pointed out to me, I noticed it, too. It became a running thing -- "Oh, look, another noun book!"

I was putting books away today and ran across a little gaggle of noun books, and that got me interested in exactly how many I did have. The informal definition of a noun book is that it has to have a one-word title that's a noun (singular or plural), and I think the rule is that it has to be non-fiction. Proper names don't count, I decided. Here's what I found:



Since this is not a rigorous exercise, I made up a pile of honorary noun books that are noun books with "The" attached:



And just in case fiction counts, what the heck, I did the same again for Noun Books, the Fiction Edition.





And with this vital news report out of the way, we now return to our regular programming, whatever that is.


Update I see that the extreme complexity of this whole business caused me to put books into the wrong piles. Welp, I ain't gonna re-do all the pics, coz handling all those dusty books made me sneezy. You get the idea, anyway.

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