why not sneeze? |
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Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Real names of Major League Baseball players:
Monday, January 19, 2004
Stephen Jay Gould, though deceased, has evidently just published a book about baseball, titled Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville. The Guardian thinks it's pretty swell, especially for non-Americans. The review contains the following classic description: There is a view in Britain that baseball is little more than rounders, but it is a view clouded by our affinity with cricket and all its complexities In my experience, rounders is a game played mainly by reluctant schoolgirls who use it as vehicle to carry on a break-time conversation. Police investigation at Union Square means an hour long commute this AM. In this spirit, here are NYC's worst subway disasters:
Source: http://www.nycsubway.org/faq/accidents.html (and elsewhere). Forgotten New York has a good section on the Malbone Street disaster. A surprising number of accidents have occurred in August. I wonder why? Thursday, January 15, 2004
Some time ago there appeared this article in the Philadelphia Weekly Paper about how great it would be if the libraries were all -- umm-- closed for good. And converted into public computer terminal repositories. I e-mailed the author to tell him that not everyone could afford to just go and buy the books they wanted on Amazon, and that since probably less than 2% of what's sold on Amazon in available in any form on the internet, it might be a bit premature to start clearing all those spaces out (and get rid of that "mildewey decimal smell" -- he thinks he's funny). I never heard back from him, but I can only assume that this response from The Morning News is itself a parody of that earlier article. The uninformed optimism and anti-intellectualism are here in abundance: Libraries, as useless as they are, cannot be turned into franchised retail venues, but that doesn’t mean millions of city dollars must be spent to keep open buildings that, in an illiterate world, are useless. As it turns out, libraries can become useful again – if they are converted into more practical things. One possibility is a television center, where we can feed on five- or 10-minute slices of entertainment. Today’s man is a creature on the go, so clips rather than whole shows would prevent wasting patrons’ time, or worse, boring their minds. For instance, feeds might show all the various ways and reasons Homer has said ‘D’oh’ on The Simpsons, or slow-motion clips of characters being killed on The Sopranos. Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Here is a list of trademarks that are actually not generic -- that is, they are "owned" -- but are used generically. Some are expected: Jello, Frisbee, Hoover. But some are quite surprising:
So watch out when you use these terms. There is also a list of formerly trademarked items now used generically:
Friday, January 09, 2004
Simon LeBon is such an avid reader that he has his own book club. Evidently he is living in Russia, or something, since most of the books are either by Russian authors or are set in Moscow. Also: "Simon is currently reading 'Gravity's Rainbow' by Thomas Pynchon." Okay, I've just lost all faith in your club, Simon -- no one voluntarily reads Gravity's Rainbow. Thursday, January 08, 2004
A cross cultural comparison of "Peasant poets." John Clare. Surely the most famous of the lot, Clare worked as a ploughboy, potboy, gardener, lime burner, and other occupations, and was mostly self-educated. He became a phenomenon in London upon the publication of his first book, "Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery," and was the object of praise and condescension in equal measure. He fell from favor shortly thereafter, however, and appears to have suffered from mental illness (he walked 80 miles to Northborough and survived by "eating grass from the roadside") and so spent his later years in a variety of asylums, dying in 1864, at once the illustration and victim of the romantic outlook. Shuangqing, Chinese Peasant Poet woman of the 18th Century, recalled in a memoir by an obscure artist. She was alleged to have learned to write poetry despite a repressive and patriarchal feudal regime, by sitting outside the village school. Her star has waxed and waned throughout Chinese history ever since, and she has been held up to represent the ideals of the ruling regime. She may have been wholly invented -- there are those who suggest that she was invented as an empathetic figure for those who had failed the imperial examination, and thus failed to get a job in government. Matsuo Taseko, a woman poet from the 19th century, who has also been posthumously converted into an icon, this time for embracing the traditional social and gender roles of her era, while gently bemoaning the limitations those roles imposed on her. Robert Bloomfield, shoemaker and/or tailor from Suffolk, also product of the Romantic era, also praised by the lights of his day, also died in poverty. He appears to have been of poor physical health his entire life. Sergei Esenin, who lived around the time of the Russian Revolution, and wrote a poetry celebrating the proletariat and peasantry, yet tied strongly to the Russian past. He was briefly married to Isadora Duncan (?). Depression, alcoholism, suicide at 30 in the Hotel d'Angleterre in Leningrad, disavowed by the Russian authorities. Patrick Kavanagh -- another shoemaker! (this time from Ireland). Achieved recogition in his lifetime, though he spent much of the middle period of his life embroiled in a lawsuit that he ultimately lost. However, he bounced back and was appointed to a faculty position by the same man who had opposed him during the lawsuit. The only common threads here I see are -- hard, disappointing lives (with the exception of Matsuo Taseko), and evidence of the ability of acclaim to destroy as well as build up. Perhaps some of this is due to the one-dimensionality with which they were perceived (that is, as icons rather than individuals). Their stories lead off in fascinating directions that I wish I had time to follow. |
