mike's web log

The Life of "St. Arthur" in Old English

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 17:12:06 GMT

Here's the final exercise that I did for our Old English poetry class. During that week we read something written in what's called metrical prose — it's essentially prose, but apparently Anglo-Saxon writers still liked their rhythms and their alliteration. ("Prose shaped like song" — Paull Franklin Baum) Unlike poetry, metrical prose isn't too concerned about the fussier metrical rules, and it doesn't include fancy kennings/metaphors.

A frequent topic of metrical prose was the life of a saint, such as Ælfric's Life of Saint Oswald. It's easy to imagine these pieces as entertaining (and, importantly, edifying) texts that were read out loud while monks ate their meals.

Our assignment was to write something in metrical prose that was kind of hagiographic. Here you go! :)

Wæs on þām tīdum yfel ealdum, micel unsibb wæs on þām lande,
In those days there was ancient evil, great unrest was in the land,

mǣnige fīend wǣron feorrancumen and āfeohtan woldon.
many enemies were come from far away and wanted to fight.

Se eþelweard Engla, Uther wæs hē gehāten,
The king of the English, he was named Uther

on weg gehworfen wæs, þus wearþ rīce hlāforde bedroren.
had passed away, thus the realm was bereaved of a lord.

Cnapa on þām lande lifde, cnihte tō his brēþer.
A boy lived in that land, a squire to his brother.

Artur wæs his nama; þes esne his mǣge wel þēowode.
His name was Arthur; this servant served his relative well.

[more]

52 things I learned this year

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:33:24 GMT

Some folks these days write up year-end pieces on 52 things they've learned in the preceding months — Tom Whitwell was the first one I encountered, and Nancy Friedman has written roundups as well. This year I managed my own! A 52-item list of things I learned is offered here for your inspection and possible amusement/enjoyment.

The Wikipedia article about the Ship of Theseus has been edited so many times that not a single original sentence remains. I've seen this claim several times, but I don't know how you'd verify it. From a Reddit thread.
The word squeegee is older than I thought. If you'd asked me, I would have guessed that it was a genericized trademark. But no; it's probably a nautical term from as early as the 1840s that might have referred to a mop or mopping. From Etymonline.
In the US, pickup trucks have gotten much bigger, and the cabin size has gotten much bigger in proportion to bed (cargo) size. This is best illustrated by a couple of charts. Here's a size comparison over time from Business Insider:

And here's the change in the proportion of cab to bed from the Diminished Value of Georgia site:

[more]

Cattes wīsdōm/Cat wisdom

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 10:46:58 GMT

This week's Old English reading was a poem that goes by the name "Precepts", in which a father ~~lectures his son~~ dispenses life wisdom. You can read a modern English translation; here's a sample:

A fourth time the father taught again
his mind-beloved son, so that he remembered this:
“Abandon not your most intimate friend,
but ever always keep him close—
as is rightly fitting. Perform this courtesy,
so that you never become vile to your own friend.”

... and so on.

Well, heck, I knew someone around our own household who attempts to dispense wisdom in this way every morning. Thus my attempt at a precept.

Þus catte cræftglēaw, ful cene socc-þēof,
Thus the wise cat, very keen sock-thief,

āgendfrēan idelne undierne lǣrde,
the lazy owner clearly admonished,

hlaforde hlȳdde, uht-hlemman cȳþde:
to the master clamored, with dawn-noise said:

"Nǣfre ne lata þū on lof-dǣde, þǣt lēof-dēor forhyge,
"Never be late with glory-deeds, don't ignore the dear-animal,

þearfan þīnes hūs-þegnes. Beþence nīede,
the needs of your house-thane. Consider the distress,

gelǣste langoþum þīnes lēo-cynnes.
attend to the longings of your lion-kin.

[more]

I speak for the trees ... in Old English

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 13:39:25 GMT

One more, I think. Our assignment for the Old English class this week was …

Write 8–12 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse retelling a fable. It should end with a moral, or a bit of proverbial wisdom. Include 5 formulae. Use the Beowulf poet’s technique of following a description of an event with a lesson. Often these morals take the form: swā sceal… or swylc sceal….

People retold some excellent fables — The Scorpion and the Frog, The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, and The Peacock and the Crane. One person retold Schleicher's fable (!), which was originally a fable written in reconstructed Proto Indo-European about a sheep and some horses.[1]

Anyway, I (as usual) didn't entirely follow the assignment, and I retold a more modern "fable" about capitalism written in 1971. The tale concerns a greedy Once-ler, a forest of profitable Truffula trees, the inhabitants of the woods, and a moralizing Lorax.

Gieddaþ glēomann fram gēardagum
Sings the minstrel from days gone by

bē wuda wrǣtlicum, wealde geþūfum,
about the wondrous woods, the leafy forest,

grāfe geapum grēne standan,
the spacious grove standing green,

trēowa getrumum, Truffula hāten.
the troop of trees called Truffula.

[more]

Gettysburg Address in Old English

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 15:24:36 GMT

Another fun assignment in our Old English class:

Write 6–10 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse paraphrasing a famous speech from history or literature. Include at least four formulae and at least one hypermetric line.

In Anglo-Saxon poetry there are 4 beats ("lifts") per line, 2 in the first half-line (the A verse) and 2 in the second half-line (the B verse). Here's an example from a modern English rendering of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the half lines are separated with a caesura marked with ||.

The siege and assault || having ceased at Troy
as its blazing battlements || blackened to ash

But sometimes poets created "hypermetrical" lines that had more beats than this 2+2 convention, typically 3+2 or 3+3. As one source puts it, "No one knows what these changes in rhythm are meant to imply." Per our instructor, it seems that hypermetrical lines sometimes set off quotations and sometimes implied a kind of elevated thought. To state a couple of theories.

Anyway, a famous speech, you say? An easy choice is the Gettysburg Address (the original is below). Here's my rendering, which is not a line-for-line restatement, given the length[1] and that the assignment has us including formulae and whatnot.

Gefirn ūre fæderas on foldan forþbrohton
Long ago our fathers on earth brought forth [more]

Unlikely Anglo-Saxon heroes

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 10:55:47 GMT

This semester I'm taking a class in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) poetry. In the class we read poems and learn about poetic techniques. That includes the mechanics (alliteration, meter) as well as the themes and styles that were favored by Anglo-Saxon poets.

We also compose our own poems! The assignment for our most recent class was this:

Write 6–10 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse likening a particular fictional character to a Germanic hero. The more incongruous the comparison, the better! Include at least 5 formulae.

A fun challenge. In addition to tending to the mechanics, there's this "formulae" thing. Poetry was an oral art in the old days; the formulae are quasi-stock phrases — things like þegnas æt þearfe ("thanes at the hour of need") and strang and stiþmod ("strong and resolute"). It seems that Anglo-Saxon poets would improvise poems and could throw in these formulae to keep the poem moving along. Our class keeps a hoard of these stock phrases, conveniently sortable by how they alliterate.

Students wrote some outstanding stuff: there were two (!) poems with Star Wars themes (people came up with Old English terms for "X-wing fighter" and "lightsaber"); one about Bugs Bunny, with the excellent twist that the hunter has a lisp (hawa instead of hara for "hare", i.e. "wabbit"); and a poem about Babe the Sheep-Pig.

I wrote about a beloved character who was about as un-warrior-like as I could imagine. I took the "not a strict limit" instruction to heart and ended up summarizing (sort of) an entire chapter of a well-known children's book. Here's the attempt:

[more]

And now to "Beowulf"

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 08:04:58 GMT

This week I start an Old English class in which we begin our reading of Beowulf. I believe that the arc for most (all?) Old English courses is to start with the basics, work one's way through shorter pieces, and culminate with reading the big B.

This week's assignment is to read the first 79 lines, in which Hrothgar has the great hall Heorot built. (Soon, as many of us know, it will be visited by Grendel ...)

I had to think for a bit about whether I even wanted to take this Beowulf class. Back in 1980, I took the Old English series at the University of Washington. That consisted of two parts: part 1 was grammar and shorter readings, part 2 was Beowulf, one semester (quarter?) each. As I've been taking OE classes again over the last couple of years, I marvel at how rapidly we must have worked our way through the readings. I absolutely could not keep that pace up now in my dotage.

The experience back in the day also must have traumatized me a little, because ever since I restarted Old English classes, I've been stressed about the prospect of revisiting Beowulf. I expressed this hesitancy to our instructor, who has assured us multiple times that the readings we've done so far — including "The Battle of Maldon", "The Wanderer", "The Seafarer", and the horrible (to me) "Andreas" poem — have prepared us well for tackling Beowulf.

But I also had to stop and think about a question that several people have asked me: why am I taking Old English classes at all? The answer at first was easy — because it's fun! I've had enough German to recognize and be delighted by the resemblance between OE and German, not to mention the joy of finding ancestral and fossil words of modern English.[ [more]

Library Extension for Chrome

Sat, 28 Oct 2017 14:36:07 GMT

Here's a keen thing I learned about from a Vox article: a Chrome extension named Library Extension that adds library information when you're viewing books on Amazon or Goodreads. The extension tells you whether the book you're interested in is available in one or more library systems.

Let's say you're interested in the book The ABC of How We Learn, so you look it up on Amazon. In the bar at the top of the page, the library extension icon lights up to tell you that you're on an enabled site:

On the actual page where you're viewing book information, the extension displays library information:

If you want to get the book from the library, you click the Borrow button. This sends you to the library site with the book preloaded.

To configure the extension—for example, to tell it which libraries you want to look in—you click the icon in the toolbar, then click Options:

In the options dialog, you find the library you're interested in, then click the add (+) button:

[more]

Of giants and fossil fuels

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 11:20:36 GMT

Recently I finished The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson, which is a book about the English scientist Joseph Priestley, who is best known as the discoverer of oxygen. Johnson shows how Priestley had a strong influence on both science and politics (he was a close friend Jefferson and Franklin). But Priestley also sat at a historical confluence that was conducive to, basically, Enlightenment thinking, and Johnson ties together many threads in a way reminiscent of James Burke: coffeehouses and efficient postal delivery, which fostered open and fast communication; innovations in scientific technology, which let Priestley engage in the experiments he did; the wealth of the industrial age, which indirectly provided Priestley with the time to do research; and so on.

At times the chains of connections go quite far indeed -- for example, from Priestley's simple experiment with a mint plant all the way to the field of planetary ecology. A continuing theme is energy: sunlight to feed plants, coffee to feed scientific minds, oxygen to feed animals, coal to feed the industrial revoltuion, and so on. To discuss these last two, Johnson takes a side trip way back in Earth history to the Carboniferous era, where he tells the following story.

Many of the fossils that Brongniart uncovered shared a defining characteristic: compared to their modern equivalents, they were massive. He discovered ferns the size of oak trees, and flies as big as birds. In 1880 he unearthed his most startling find: a monster dragonfly (Meganeura) with a wingspan of 63 centimeters [2 feet]. Subsequent fossils have been discovered with a wingspan of more than 75 centimeters.

[more]

Is college the only path?

Wed, 27 May 2009 18:38:23 GMT
Among people I know, the discussion for the most part is not whether a kid will go to college, but how this college business is going to be paid for. People start college funds for their toddlers. A college degree is seen as the minimum entry point to a career, or was back when people still talked about careers.

But between the mania for outsourcing that started in the 90s (or thereabouts) and the current economic downturn, the golden ticket of a college degree is looking a little tarnished.[1] A person with a pessimistic POV might wonder why we're training all these kids to jump into a job pool that, at least for the moment, seems to be drying up.

Assuming I'm reading trends correctly, we therefore seem to be undergoing a little bit of a, um, adjustment in how we view the skilled trades. Back in March, the NPR correspondent Adam Davidson appeared on the radio program "This American Life." His mission, he said, was "to save his cousin DJ's life, to make his life better." Save it how? Cousin DJ had dropped out of college. By dropping out of college, Davidson maintained, you are making a conscious decision "to not partake in the economic growth and possibilities of the coming decade." The program then featured a three-way conversation between Davidson, his cousin DJ, and the economist Pietra Rivoli, whom Davidson had enlisted to help him convince cousin DJ of his folly.

[more]

Shakespeare's editors

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:17:48 GMT
A short while ago, a guy strolled into the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., which is one of the, or the, preeminent repository of Shakespearean stuff. He wanted to know if the First Folio he was carrying was the real item. As it happens, it was; it was a volume that had been stolen 10 years ago from the University of Durham in England. The dude is currently a guest of the state in the UK while they sort out the story.

The First Folio is an edition of the collected works of Shakespeare, plus some other plays. That the First Folio exists at all is unusually good luck; that we have so many copies, doubly so. Much of the work of other Elizabethan playwrights has vanished, since their work was either never written down, or written down and not printed, or printed but lost. As Bill Bryson points out in his Shakespeare Lite study:
Only about 230 plays survive from the period of Shakespeare’s life, of which the First Folio represents some 15 percent, so Heminges and Condell saved for the world not only half the plays of William Shakespeare, but an appreciable portion of all Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
The First Folio was printed after Shakespeare’s death, but it was assembled by people who had worked with him. This gives you an idea of what we might have had:
To aid recollection, they had much valuable material to work with—-prompt books, foul papers (as rough drafts or original copies were known) in Shakespeare’s own hand, and the company’s own fair copies.
[more]

The green, green grass of home

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:18:04 GMT
Where I live, a homeowners association keeps tabs on your groundskeeping.[1]. They don't insist that you have a lawn, but if you do, you have to make sure that it's looked after.

In the current issue of the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert examines the lawn, its history, its upkeep, and its possible future. Such interesting things we learn.

The stereotypical suburban lawn is a product of entirely unnatural horticulture. None of the grasses used for lawns are native to the US. If left alone, grass goes through a natural life cycle in which it develops seeds. We thwart this natural lifecycle in various ways. One is to mow:
Mowing turfgrass quite literally cuts off the option of sexual reproduction. From the gardener’s perspective, the result is a denser, thicker mat of green. From the grasses’ point of view, the result is a perpetual state of vegetable adolescence. With every successive trim, the plants are forcibly rejuvenated.
Grass also goes dormant when conditions are not favorable. In its dormant state, it gets brown. People don't like that, so we have a way to prevent that. One is to pour hundreds of millions of gallons of water onto the lawn. Another is to use chemicals:
[...] repeated applications of synthetic fertilizer could counteract turfgrasses’ seasonal cycle by, in effect, tricking the plants into putting out new growth. Sensing a potential bonanza, lawn-care companies began marketing the idea of an ever-green green. The Scotts Company recommended that customers apply its fertilizer, Turf Builder, no fewer than five times a year.
Fertilizer is non-discriminating; it will happily feed grass, weeds, whatever--in short, anything that can use nitrogen. But wait; we want grass, but we don't want "weeds". (Further) better living through chemistry:
[more]

Single-celled organisms

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:42:32 GMT
I've been reading The Canon by Natalie Angier, which she calls a "whirligig" tour of science. It's not 100% clear to me what she means by whirligig, but I might go with "giddy" (#). Angier has a style that features a lot of wordplay; think, dunno, Anthony Lane, maybe, but about science, not movies. The book tours physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy—the usual suspects. It's an exuberant piece of writing, although I'm not sure I'd hand it out as an introductory textbook.[1]

I didn't want to let the book slip back to the library unmentioned, and as an inducement for you to check it out, I wanted to set something down. In the chapter on biology, I learned something that I had never thought about and that I found quite surprising. Here 'tis. (I'll note that this is an unusually subdued bit out of the book, but it was one of the more remarkable things I learned.)
[more]

The vacation getaway

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:54:42 GMT
I promised (myself, anyway) a while back that I’d find some more fun cites from David Owen’s book Sheetrock & Shellac. If you’re just joining us[1], Owen is a writer who bought a 200-year-old house, and in the course of maintaining and improving the house, has learned and written a lot about home improvement. That is, specifically from the perspective of a guy who writes for a living as opposed to, you know, doing construction. As noted before, the book Sheetrock & Shellac is an enjoyably wandering tour through Owen’s adventures in building (having someone build him) a cabin.

So. With summer nearly here (except in Seattle, it appears), one’s thoughts turn to things like vacations. Are you thinking of going away this summer? Sounds like fun. But maybe you dread the hassle of packing everyone and everything up and spending hours in the car. Let alone the sharp pain you know you’ll feel when you refill the gas tank.

Here’s a novel feature of David Owen’s cabin: it’s in the same town where he and his family live. That’s right; their vacation home is something like 20 minutes away from their normal home. Owen observes the following:
[more]

Houses: TCO

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:29:09 GMT
David Owen, an author I particularly like (and an alum of The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harpers, and Golf Digest[1]), years ago wrote an article on sheetrock (that is, Sheetrock[2]), which he expanded into the book The Walls Around Us, accurately subtitled "The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works." I've read the book multiple times, and I've pressed copies of it onto every homeowner I know (not always with the success of an appreciative recipient, alas). Even with the Great Purging of Books 'round here, I still have, like, three copies of it on the shelf.

Owen's interest in houses and home improvement did not end with that book, and he expanded some subsequent writings about houses into the book Sheetrock and Shellac[3]. This book describes, among other things, his adventures in building a cabin, a topic of some interest to me at the moment.

David Owen is the writer I'd like to be when I grow up. On every page I find stuff that makes me poke the person closest by and read out loud to them. At the moment, you're that person. Listen to this, a story that I'll pick up in medias res:
[more]

Roundup

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:49:06 GMT
I realized belatedly that as of last Thursday, I've officially been an editor for three years. Unofficially, of course, it's more like 40 years.

How to read the New Yorker in 10 Easy Steps. Much-needed advice on how to keep up. [via grow-a-brain]

(Some) Computer Technicians Are Creepy. Leon Bambrick, author of TimeSnapper, a logging program, discovers what's been happening on his computer while it's in the shop. Yikes.

On the crossword. Michael Covarrubias on linguistic tactics for solving crosswords.

Algebra, Geometry, Functions: At 38, Taking the SAT Is Tough. How do you think you'd score on the SAT today, 20 (or 30, or 35) years later? This is sort of topical for us at home, coz we've been looking at GRE study materials. The math stuff has long since evaporated, and a surprising amount of the English seems more ambiguous and open to interpretation than it did in (ahem) 1978.

The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming!

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:04:40 GMT
Reading history has many rewards. One is learning things that you either didn't know, or as often happens to me, that you thought you knew but ain't necessarily so. Another reward is that history writers can be an unexpectedly entertaining lot. For example, consider this informative passage from Inventing a Nation by Gore Vidal:
A month before Second Continental Congress assembled [in May 1775], British troops fired, at Lexington in Massachusetts, on some American armed "minute men." Although eight Americans were killed, the British discovered to their no doubt horror, that American farmers and backwoodsmen did not fight fair. Instead of wearing bright red uniforms, visible for miles around, they tended to hide behind trees, bushes, and rocks, and, if nothing else, America was extraordinarily rich in these rustic objects. Where British soldiers strutted into battle in well-drilled ranks, the Americans slouched from bush to protecting wall and then, invisibly, fired at will. They were like ... well, no other word for it, indians.
Dang. This put in motion some events that ultimately had a profound effect on American history, altho not in the way that was initially intended.
This sickening discovery was swiftly relayed back to London. King George III, who had made the monumental mistake of learning English, was very much the head of the war party, and so, more in anger than in sorrow, he dropped the mask of Mr. Nice Guy.[1] He would now use his indians, some thirty thousand German soldiers, mostly from Hesse, a Rhineland province bordering his family's Hanoverian place of origin. The Hessians turned out to be more generally effective than the American or, indeed, the British troops.
[more]

Roundup

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:24:53 GMT
Do you remember when it was always "Batteries not included"? That seems to have changed -- I've gotten all sorts of things where a couple of AAs have been packaged up right with the device. Or more common yet, things that require various types of button batteries.

250,000 digits of the square root of 9. "Below you will find the first 250,000 digits of the square root of the integer 9. In the spirit of Project Gutenberg's 1 million+ digits of pi, I have decided to provide this valuable service to WWW users worldwide." Alas, no source code is provided for generating this number. Also: First 50,000 Random numbers.

10 day survival pack for your vehicle for just $25. Around here this week, it might also be handy if "your cushion acts as a flotation device." Note also that no one says this has to be just for your car. In a similar vein, see Scott Hanselman's extensive post from a couple of years ago on how to emergency-prepare your whole life, basically. [car kit via Raymond Chen]

How to Secure Your Computer, Disks, and Portable Drives. In light of Yet Another incident in which a laptop was stolen that had millions of confidential records on it, Bruce Schneier describes how he secures his laptop, thumb drives, and external drives. [via the daily grind]

That Time, at Christmas, When Dad Shot Santa... [more]

Two cats

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 10:09:09 GMT
When I was packing up my house, I had the care of, nominally at least, four cats. Having a house had unleashed in me the Crazy Old Lady Who Collects Cats, and I'd been a soft touch for cats who needed homes, with a changing population of up to five at a time. At the time of the move, I had two girl cats who were real housecats, a tortie with a Zen disposition, and a tiny tabby who was so skittish that some of my friends had never managed to lay eyes on her. I also had two boy cats, a near-feral long-haired cat and a big orange male who had once been the alpha animal but had largely decamped to the out of doors for reasons unknown.

The move presented some quandaries. Moving cats is tricky; you never know how they'll react. In the end, I moved the two girl cats to the new place, and did that thing where you lock them into a room until they seem calmed down. As for the boy cats, good fortune intervened in the form of a cat-loving neighbor. It turns out that the two males had taken up residence in his yard (tho not his house), and supped at the bowl he puts out for any neighborhood cat that wants a snack. When he learned that I might be moving the cats, or worse yet, might have to find new homes for them, he was adamant that they should remain with him. And so they have, having, as sometimes happens, much more fondness for their locale than for any ol' supposed owner. I have visited and learned for myself that they're perfectly content where they are.

In the new place, Zen cat settled in. After an encounter or two with a new household dog, protocol was established. But the skittish cat remained skittish and would slink into and out of the house warily. Her jumpiness excited the dogs' instincts, even the two dogs she'd been living with for years, and when she would run, they'd all give chase and out she'd go, over the fence, only to come back hours later.

[more]

Roundup

Thu, 17 May 2007 01:13:20 GMT
Motley stuff. Haven't been reading so much recently.

The absolute bare minimum every programmer should know about regular expressions. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but the absolute bare minimum required to use regex in any meaningful way is still confusing as hell. Not because the explanations are bad, but because I think that regex syntax was dreamed up by the same guy who designed the spelling system in English. [via Gunderloy]

The Post-Rapture Post, "Postal Service of the Saved". You can send letters to those who are Left Behind after the Rapture. Guaranteed delivery because the site is run by atheists. FAQ for those with questions. [via Colleague Kim]

Live Ink offers better way to read text online. "Live Ink works by analyzing written language for meaning and language structure, and then applies algorithms that reformat the text into a series of short, cascading phrases. It breaks complex syntax into simpler syntax, which makes it easier for the brain to absorb the material." I suspect there will be scoffing, but I think there might be something there. [via the editors' alias at work]

Requirements. Erik Sink with another in his occasional series on running a software business, this time on the care and feeding (or despair and bleeding) of requirements/specifications. He's one of those writers you read no matter what he's writing about. What's not to like about this? [more]

Bryson on the 50s

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 02:15:25 GMT
Like about everyone else I know, I just finished Bill Bryson's book The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, his memoir of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s. "Memoir" here is a little loose, and the book might have been subtitled "(With imaginative embellishments)", though only the most literal-minded would accuse him of being a James Frey, one hopes.

Bryson has many observations to make -- civil defense drills, McCarthy hearings, the excitement of color TV, his much-beloved comic books -- all of which he describes in his trademark bemused style. Here is one observation that also sort of sums up the decade:
I don't know how they managed it, but the people responsible for the 1950s made a world in which pretty much everything was good for you. Drinks before dinner? The more the better! Smoke? You bet! Cigarettes actually made you healthier, by soothing jangly nerves and sharpening jaded minds, according to the advertisements. "Just what the doctor ordered!" read ads for L&M cigarettes, some of them in The Journal of the American Medical Association where cigarette ads were gladly accepted right up to the 1960s. X-rays were so benign that shoe stores installed special machines that used them to measure foot sizes, sending penetrating rays up through the soles of your feet and right out the top of your head. There wasn't a particle of tissue within you that wasn't bathed in their magical glow. No wonder you felt energized and ready for a new pair of Keds when you stepped down.

[more]

Roundup

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:52:58 GMT
Stuff I've run across.

Why marketing should make the user manuals! The Creating Passionate Users blog muses on jazzy marketing vs. boring manuals. (Also previously discussed here on this blog.)

19 pieces of "advice" for entering 1Ls. The Superannuated1L blog proposes how to get through your first year of law school. (Or, I add, through most of life.)

Revenge on Stingrays. "... concerned that the rays, which are usually docile creatures, were being hunted and killed in retaliation for [Steve] Irwin's death."

I like like. Matthew Baldwin aka defective yeti manages, like, the world's most compact disquisition on like. Excerpt (and summary): "Call it the 'Past Approximate.' If someone tells you they once ate fourteen eggs in one sitting, you recognize that is a boast; if someone says they ate, like, fourteen eggs, you know instinctively that the number was probably closer to five."

Why the _______s Hate the _______s. A non-denominational, trans-national guide to ... uh, pretty much most of human history.

Pluto mnemonic device contest. Actually, the results. Jason Kottke ran a contest to come up with a mnemonic for the order of the planets, now that Pluto no longer counts. One of the runners-up: Many Very Earnest Men Just Snubbed Unfortunate Ninth Planet.

[more]

Parent poems

Mon, 22 May 2006 13:36:37 GMT
In a small moment of synchronicity, a few days back we were exchanging poems about children growing up. And the next day, Terry Gross interviewed Billy Collins, who talked about the collection Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006. During the interview, they mentioned poems that talk about parents.

So here's a small collection of poems about parents and children.
A Little Tooth

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

-- Thomas Lux
Eighteen and Adieu

She’s straddling the cusp.
Likes to linger over things.
Some days a dizziness that neither speaks nor replies
is lured by the aroma of Chinese roses,
still water & a small white candle.

She’s the flutter of a single confetti
trailing in a tumult, a gala,
like the ships in great grandma’s day embarking.
Bellow of their horn fattening

the air, gliding imperceptibly
into new reality. Embryonic awkward
swelling between shore and vessel.

We wave we smile we sigh, ambivalent
as we hear in the distance
she’s still got her giggle.

-- Carol Levin
Those Winter Sundays

[more]

Rummaging around

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 13:02:30 GMT
I just finished the book Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, which I liked a lot. This bit struck me as ... familiar:
There were so many facts that Amelia no longer felt certain about (or perhaps she had never known them). She would soon be nearer fifty than forty, and she was sure that every day she could feel more neural pathways disappearing -- fusing and arcing and dying -- leaving her unable to retrieve information. Right up until the end, her father's mind had been as methodical as an efficient library, whereas Amelia felt that hers was more like the cupboard under the stair where ancient hockey sticks were shoved in beside broken Hoovers and boxes of old Christmas decorations, and the one thing you knew was in there -- a five-amp fuse, a tin of shoe polish, a Phillips screwdriver -- would almost certainly be the one thing you couldn't lay your hands on.

Our guy of type

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 14:22:50 GMT

A recent (5 Dev 2005) edition of The New Yorker has an article on Matthew Carter, who according to the article is one of the, or just the, most prolific typeface designer around. In the article, it notes that Carter was the designer of Verdana, the font included with Windows and the designated font for this blog.[1]

Here's some interesting history:

Carter enjoyes designing type for inhospitable environments. "Many of the projects that have interested me most," he says, "have involved somehow the instruction, Make a typeface that will work at tiny size when printed on newspaper at very high speed in ink composed of kerosene and lampblack—all the lowest standards of production." Before he designed Verdana for Microsoft in 1993, the typefaces on computers were adapted from type used in magazines and books and newspapers. Because the resolution on computer screens is so imprecise, the letters look scrawny and thin.

It surprises me that people continue to work with typefaces that don't look so hot on computer screens. The default font for Internet Explorer appears to be Times New Roman, which of course is a typeface derived from print. How many Web pages have we seen where no effort is made to specify a font, and it ends up with serif 12-point Times? According to my research, the answer is: many.

Screen font legibility is an issue when you work on-screen most of the time. Jeff Atwood, who thinks about programmer productivity and human factors a lot, has written a couple of blog entries on the issue of fonts for programmers. In one [more]