Tag: nifty stuff

Where I’ve Been

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Snowed under, mostly.

Well, not quite in the literal sense; the driveway and the front door never actually became impassable, though the town snowplows were admirably zealous in replacing the ridge of snow at the foot of the driveway on a regular basis. Nevertheless, February was a bitterly cold and snowy month, with only a couple of days when the temperature outside even drew near 32°F, and so far March has only taken us above freezing for a couple of afternoons – not enough to melt all the snow by a long shot, and the weather forecast for the next week is calling for more snow and daytime temps somewhere in the twenties.

The cold winter, with the thermometer occasionally swinging from twenty below to twenty above in the same 24-hour period, has also played merry hell with our plumbing.  A word to those contemplating a move to deep snow country:  PVC pipes do not cope well with conditions of extreme cold, and their natural lifespan is greatly shortened on that account.  Pipes all over town have been freezing and breaking and springing leaks, and the local plumbers have all the business they can handle.

All of this is a long way around to explaining why I haven’t posted for a while.  I’ve got a post on commas in the works; meanwhile, have a couple of amusing or at least interesting links:

If you’re writing a fantasy novel and one or more entries on this list make you cringe, you may need to rethink a few things.

Also, a blog post on the origins of “okay”.  (Personal position statement here:  I’ve always favored the Cherokee and/or African loan-word theory, and think that the “Orll Korrect” and “Old Kinderhook” etymologies are a bunch of hooey.)

And finally, a tale of modern-day cattle-rustling in the Texas Panhandle.

 

Today’s Bit of Amusement

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Over at The Toast, “How to Tell if You Are in a Logic Puzzle.”

Because heaven knows, Logic Puzzle Land has only a tangential relationship to Real Life Land.

Obligatory writing reference:  When constructing plots and figuring out character motivations, remember that Fiction Land generally strives to reflect Real Life Land, not Logic Puzzle Land.  There are a few instances where it’s closer to Logic Puzzle Land – the strict-form allegory, for example, or the roman à clef – but those are the exceptions rather than the rule.

(Now that I think of it, that’s a good way to distinguish between an allegorical work and one that merely makes heavy use of symbolism and metaphor:  If the workings of the plot and the actions of the characters appear to be taking place in Logic Puzzle Land, you’re probably dealing with an allegory.)

For Your Amusement

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A trio of links, from the useful to the odd.

Table Scraps — a food history blog, with more blog links in the sidebar.  (Including one to Pass the Garum!, a blog about Roman cookery.)

Three-Panel Book Reviews, a webcomic that says entirely truthful and funny things about works of literature.  I especially liked the one about Jonathan Franzen, but they’re all good.

And finally, a performance of “Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave” (as “Little Matty Groves” was known before it crossed the Atlantic) sung in Esperanto.

Presented for Your Amusement

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A quartet of links to things that caught my eye or tickled my fancy over the past few days:

Descriptive Linguist Tom Scott Preaches the Good Word

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The good word, in this case, is the singular neutral gender pronoun they, and Scott has a wonderful YouTube video and accompanying post on the subject.

He’s got a whole bunch of other posts about linguistics up on YouTube, and they’re all worth watching and reading.  It’s nice to see entertaining pedagogy taking place outside a formal context; knowledge is a good thing, and deserves a chance to go out in public and meet people, instead of staying cooped up in the classroom all the time.

For Your Amusement

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A trio of links:

These people have developed a blight-resistant American chestnut tree, and are now crowdfunding a project to plant 10,000 new trees and start the work of bringing the species back to American forests.

Here are some nifty pictures of spherical layer cakes frosted to look like planets – complete with proper planetary cores.  And here’s a link to a tutorial on how to make one yourself at home.

And finally, in honor of the upcoming holiday, a link to NASA’s cornbread dressing recipe.

Another Nifty Digital Archive

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Because the past is another country, but sometimes you can visit it through pictures:

The CARLI Digital Collection, “established in 2006 as a repository for digital content created by member libraries of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) or purchased by the consortium for use by its members.”

You can find all sorts of stuff in there, from a photo of the 1908 Pinckneyville Fire Department to a shot of the interior of the Voss Brothers Bicycle Shop in Peoria, Illinois, circa 1920.  They’ve also got Civil War era letter collections, an archive of material dealing with the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair. a collection of plans and drawings for Pullman passenger cars, and lots and lots of campus newsletters and alumni magazines.

It’s the sort of place you can wander around in for hours.

Summer Daze

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I haven’t been around here as much as I should have been this month, for which I blame late-summer lethargy.  By way of amends, here’s a nifty research site:  a page with links to digitized medieval manuscript collections on-line.  When I think about how much I would have loved a resource like this back in my grad student days . . . I envy the scholars of today, who have all this technology at their fingertips.

Also:  a web site dedicated to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, with photos and contemporary accounts and price lists for things like food and lodging and various attractions.  (A double room with bath was $10/day at the Palmer House Hotel; or you could make do with the YMCA for $1/day if you were doing the Fair on the cheap.)

And just for giggles:  The Periodic Table of Storytelling.

Another Handy Tool

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If you’re a Scrivener user, and like to play around with the Name Generator tool, here’s a web page with a bunch of importable name files compiled by the owner from various sources.

A Bit of Amusement

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Over at The Toast:  Every Irish Novel Ever.

It’s a hoot.  Even the comments are hilarious.  (Which is a rarity, and a thing to be celebrated when it occurs, given that the comments section of most web pages could serve as an argument for the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity.)

It reminds me of my younger son’s summation of his course in The Modern Irish Novel (which would have been more accurately titled Irish Novels Not Written by James Joyce):  “Life in twentieth-century Ireland sucked.”

When you’re done, go on to read the pages for, variously, Every French, Russian, and Canadian Novel Ever.