Why didn’t I know before now that the Oxford English Dictionary has a blog?
(Where I learn, among other things, that my birth-year new word is “noshery.” I suppose I could try again and get a different one, but that would be cheating.)
And then, from YouTube, there’s this: a song about Jólakötturinn , the Icelandic Christmas Cat (who is Not a Nice Kitty):
I think we have here an explanation for the Christmas Sweater tradition….
A couple of interesting links:
The British Museum (with help from Microsoft, who did the digitization) has released over a million images from books of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries onto the internet. A few of the highlights are here.
With the end of the year coming up, a lot of people are posting their best-reads of the year list. Science fiction author Fran Wilde has an interesting one, here. Full disclosure: my co-author and I have a story on the list.
Straight out of the tale of Hansel and Gretel, it’s the world’s largest gingerbread house.
What does this have to do with writing?
Well, for one thing, it’s proof that the real world has a lot of strange stuff in it all by itself, without writers necessarily having to make strange stuff up. (Not that there’s anything wrong with making up strange stuff for the fun of it, if that’s what you like to do.)
And for another thing, it’s a salutary reminder, for those of us who write science fiction and fantasy, that we work in genres where things that in the world of consensus reality are only imaginary concepts, can and do achieve solid three-dimensional existence. Our gingerbread house isn’t just a daydream or a metaphor any longer — it’s right there in front of us, and the door is open.
It certainly looks like it. The Paris Review has interviewed Ursula K. LeGuin.
The interview is worth reading for a couple of different reasons . . . well, actually, at least three.
One is that the interviewer is not somebody from inside the science fiction/fantasy community, so the interview’s questions and answers aren’t the ones that a lifetime of reading interviews in Locus and similar in-group publications has trained us to expect.
Two is that the interviewer is not someone who knows a great deal about science fiction, to put it kindly, and watching LeGuin maneuver diplomatically around the resulting areas of ignorance is a pleasure to behold.
And three, this is Ursula K. LeGuin we’re talking about. She’s always interesting, no matter who’s interviewing her and for what.
The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia has a skull collection, and they’re working on restoring and remounting them. And they’re looking for sponsors! For only $200/year, you can contribute to the work on a particular skull, and have your name on a plaque next to it.
What does this have to do with writing? Not much, except that most of the writers I know are fascinated by the weird, the unusual, and the specialized esoteric, and the Mütter Museum qualifies on all counts. I note on their web page that they’re now partnered with the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which is an institution I remember with great fondness — I wandered in there one day shortly after arriving in Philadelphia for graduate school, took a random left turn, and walked straight into a room full of artifacts from ancient Sumer that I’d hitherto only seen in a Time-Life history book.
“Wow,” I said to myself, or words to that effect. “I’d never have seen this if I’d stayed in Texas.”
As a renegade medievalist and lapsed philologist with a bad case of Tolkien’s Disease (I haven’t yet had a novel break out into appendices full of invented language, but give me time), one of the things I keep an eye out for on the web is sites maintained by and of interest to word nuts like myself.
Today’s find is All Things Linguistic, where one can find links to discussions of what is and isn’t a sandwich (ham-and-cheese yes; paninis maybe; s’mores are an edge case) and Katharine Hepburn’s accent and translating Jabberwocky. My favorite at the moment, though, is a Tumblr devoted to sample sentences — you know, those example sentences in language and grammar books that are mostly just dull but every so often seem to have been radioed in from another, stranger planet:
If there is both a direct object and an indirect object, then the indirect object precedes the direct one:
You should never have fed that fish steroids.
(To which all I can say is, Mad Science for the win!)
It’s not that I have anything against large booksellers, or against chain booksellers . . . but I do believe that a rich and varied bookselling ecosystem is a good thing.
Right now, Star Cat Books is running an Indigogo fundraising campaign to help with the startup of a used-and-new bookstore in Bradford, Vermont, specializing in science fiction and children’s books. They’re looking to raise $8000 by the end of the campaign, and have just secured a matching donor for the next $2500 of the fundraiser, so for a limited time only any contributions made will go twice as far.
Or, today I upgraded from Windows 8.0 to Windows 8.1, which was just as much fun as it ever is. In the process, I’ve learned that everything is an app now, and not just the small handy things that come from the app store . . . when they say “you’ll have to reinstall your apps,” they’re talking about everything.
Fortunately, I had backups. I did have one moment of near-panic when I couldn’t find my installation files for Quicken 4. The newer versions of the program use a different file format than the older ones, probably because the nice people (and I use the term loosely) at Intuit want their users to keep buying new versions of their software, instead of sticking with the one that’s been doing just fine for a decade or so now, and I wouldn’t even mind it so much if there were a conversion utility or something like that available — but there isn’t. You need, so far as I can figure out, to convert your Quicken 4 files into Quicken 6 files in order to convert the Quicken 6 files into the latest format.
Fortunately, I found the files. And my backup Quicken data files are on a separate drive. So that’s all right.
And I’d like to take this opportunity to plug MozBackup, a freeware utility for backing up Firefox and Thunderbird. It has saved me a great deal of sorrow and tears.
A Roman-era sculpture of an eagle with a serpent in its beak has been found at a development site in the City of London.
I think if I lived in England I’d be afraid to so much as plant geraniums in my back garden for fear of turning up pieces of history in the process.
Today I am made peevish by people who say things like, “This begs the question…”, when what they actually mean is, “This raises the question….”
Begging the question is one of the logical fallacies; it’s what you get when you start out by assuming as true the thing that you’re trying to prove. (It’s called petitio principii in Latin; or more informally, in English, circular reasoning.)
An amusing page on logical fallacies can be found here; a more detailed, if less amusing, page is here.
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