It’s a bit rococo, possibly even tacky, but I love Jay Walker’s library. Sputnik? Check. Enigma machine? Check. An amazing assortment of medieval books on science and natural history, along with originals of the Kelmscott Chaucer, Nuremberg Chronicle, and Coverdale Bible, all mixed in with cheesy Franklin Press reprints?
Yes, yes, yes, and, oddly, yes. This is heaven, as envisioned by a bookish 15 year old.
Thanks to Magnolia (and her research assistant, Arlo) for the link.
According to CNN, this morning Obama spokesman David Wade called Sarah Palin a “leviathan of forensics.”
I can’t get those words out of my head, and I’m beginning to think it’s the best phrase anyone has ever uttered. I almost pissed myself laughing when I first heard it, and Wade now occupies a special place in my heart.
Contrast the austere pomposity of “leviathan”—the Bible, Hobbes, Melville, Auster—to the person he’s describing. Coupled to the near-obsolete use of “forensics”—he wasn’t talking about CSI: Miami—and it’s perfect. Perfect!
Politics can be so ugly, it just warms my heart that this guy pulled such a ludicrous phrase out of his ass. He’s my new hero. And it has nothing (well, very little) to do with partisan politics, or ill-will to Palin. Her recent PR troubles notwithstanding, she really isn’t bad at, er, forensics, if you check her past debates on YouTube. And Biden is a well-known loose cannon, so it could go either way.
But “Leviathan of Forensics,” it’s just too good. Here’s the full quote from CNN’s politicalticker:
“She’s very skilled and she’ll be well-prepared,” said Barack Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod Sunday night, flying with Biden back to Delaware to help him get ready.
“As you saw at the convention she can be very good. So, I think it would be foolish to assume that this isn’t going to be a really challenging debate. We’re preparing for that, on that assumption.”
Taking it one step farther, Biden spokesman David Wade later added, “He’s going in here to debate a leviathan of forensics, who has debated five times and she’s undefeated.”
Another cool experiment in typography: the Word Clock, by Simon Heys. It’s a screen saver for the Mac or PC, which displays the time, beautifully, in text. It allows fine-grain control over typographic attributes like leading and kerning, and has two modes: linear is displayed in the screenshot at right; check the web site to see what rotary looks like (the video is worth more words than I’m willing to type).
There’s also an iPhone app, which I hope gets released eventually through iTunes. From the looks of it, the current app requires you to jailbreak your phone.
Like so many of the cool design items on Errata, Steve sent this one.
Dinosaurs! They’re teh alesome, as any 8 or 38 year-old will tell you. In an ongoing effort to highlight brilliant Wordie content*, I present chained_bear‘s completely over-the-top collection of dinosaur and dinosaur-related lists:
Dinosaurs
Not a Dinosaur
Words of Dinosaurology
Archosaurs
Pterosaurs, Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, and a Coupla Placodonts ‘R’ Us
Prehistoric and Extinct Mammals ‘n’ Stuff
Living Fossils
Prehistoric and Extinct Birds
Dinosaurs that weren’t, but should have been
These comprehensive lists are well-tagged, so they can be sliced and diced by, among other things, geologic age:
and Linnaean classification:
Some related lists you might also enjoy, if you’re in a Jurassic mood:
Geological time scale, by mollusque
Dinosaur Comics, by AbraxasZugzwang
Plus there’s the fearsome tyrannosaurus reesetee. And last but not least, there’s our pal pterodactyl.
Kudos and thanks to chained_bear, this is a prodigious effort and well worth exploring. At least one of these is an open list, so if any budding dinosaurologists* want to contribute, or flesh out info on the dinosaurs and not-dinosaurs in the comments, have at.
Oh, and be advised: it pays to turn on image search when browsing dinosaur lists.
* Such posts will henceforth be tagged ‘teh alsome’ for your convenience.
** Or paleontologists, if you stand on formality.
A new feature launched this weekend: private notes on words. On any word page, where it says “Leave a comment, citation, or private note”, click on “private note” to leave a postit-style note for yourself.
This is kind of like writing in the margins of a book–if there’s something you’d like to remember about a word, or you want to leave yourself pronunciation tips or study notes or a comment-in-progress or whatever, and it doesn’t seem appropriate to make it public, write yourself a note.
I’m hoping students in particular find this useful, and also people using Wordie to create glossaries or dictionaries. I’ve corresponded with a few folks who have expressed an interest in such a use, and the combination of tags, private notes, and comments seems like a good emerging toolkit. One could use tags to aggregate the words in question (there are already a bunch of good de facto glossaries on Wordie as a result of tagging, like demon, archery and beer), then private notes while collecting definitions or usage notes, with the final result ending up as a citation in the comments.
Or, use it however you want. Any suggestions for improvements or additions are, as always, welcome.
There’s a great comment by qroqqa on rumoured, which, lest it drift by too quickly, deserves to be highlighted. It starts:
“A highly unusual verb in Present-day English: it has only this one verb form. Although it was historically a full verb with all its parts (‘Come hither Catesby, rumor it abroad, That Anne my Wife is very grieuous sicke.’—Richard III, IV.ii), for most of us today it can only be a past participle.”
Read the rest on rumoured. And thanks, qroqqa, for the insight.
Merrill Perlman* has a nice piece in the Columbia Journalism Review** about a supposed gaffe Joe Biden made earlier this year during the primaries, when he was quoted as saying “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
That quote may be missing a comma. Perlman doesn’t delve in the politics of it, or try to plumb Biden’s intentions, and I won’t either. But she goes into some detail about restrictive vs. nonrestrictive clauses, and how something as small as a single comma can significantly change meaning, and have broad-reaching repercussions. If you care about the power of language and punctuation**, it’s worth reading.
* Whom I had the pleasure of hearing speak about copy editing last month. Great talk.
** Where I worked for a while in the late nineties.
*** And I know you do.