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scholarist
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Below are the 17 most recent journal entries recorded in the "scholarist" journal:
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03:09 pm
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September 19 2008
Some things I looked up this morning: BSA motorcycles, and more particularly the Victor 441 of the late sixties; Horkay Istvan, contemporary collagist from Hungary; artist's books; Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte, a graphic collage novel published in 1934; the COBUILD Corpus, a database of English language texts that allows the user to query for sentences containing a word or search string; Secret Ballet, a novel by Detlev Fischer written exclusively by sampling sentences from the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary, which is based on the COBUILD Corpus; The Punishments of China, an 1804 book of engravings featuring methods of capital and non-capital punishment found in China at the time (available at the NYPL Digital Gallery); and a Wikipedia article on Windows Clipboard. Weather is warm but not too warm, with a bit of high cloud cover. I think we're going on a cub scout nature outing tomorrow, so if the weather holds, that will be a good time. People were telling me that the fall Nature Trek is better than the January Winter Trek, for obvious reasons. At lunch walked down to the mall, got 50 bucks and checked out Jackson Mac Low's Stanza's for Iris Lezak, in case I need to read it this weekend. I've never made it all the way through this book, but lately I've been wondering a lot about collage and that includes the sort of word collage that Mac Low constructed from existing texts. Finally realized that while I'm done with the freshman access reports I had been working on, there are at least two more that I need to do to update something we have on the web.
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02:47 am
[Link] | Finished Lehane's Gone,Baby,Gone, about two Boston private dicks
investigating a kidnapped little girl. Almost everybody involved with the case is
worse off at the end. Probably not the sort of thing you want to read if you
don't like sad endings and bad things happening to little boys and girls.
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12:00 am
[Link] | My right thigh has been getting stiff and numb when I've been sitting down for more than a few minutes. It goes away after a few seconds when I get up, but I'm worried. Right now I'm chalking it up to being out-of-shape, and I'm going to make a point of going for long exercise walks most every day this week. I'm promising to talk to Dr. G when I see him about my blood pressure in two weeks.
post/read comments
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09:55 pm
[Link] | I got a 3-month paid account here last night. I'm not sure I'll use this as
my main journal, but I like to help out people who are spending time and
out-of=pocket money to build interesting journaling sites. I suppose the
background to this feeling is what's been going on over at LJ the last
couple of weeks....
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03:45 am
[Link] | So, we got six inches of snow today, which brings the city to about 98
inches for the season. There's a bit more on the way so we should break 100
inches by tomorrow morning. The guy who does the sidewalks on either side of
us did ours again last night, but I'm still going to have to shovel the
driveway; I almost got stuck there tonight when I left for the supermarket.
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07:54 pm
[Link] | NPR had a good feature on Stravinski's Rite of Spring, its
innovation, its initial reception, and its rather quick acceptence as a
major piece in the musical canon. Archived at the usual place, I guess.
Also, NPR had more on the Bear Stearns bailout which went down this week.
And the wrapup of the Iraq war fifth anniversary coverage.
Its snowing today. There wasn't much on the ground when I got up at five,
but it got heavier by 9.00am. Six or seven inches is forecast. I remember
watching the clouds come in last night at Rocky's; I had a scared, queasy
feeling.
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02:22 pm
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St. Patricks Day
Its a gloomy and wet day, a bit colder than over the weekend. I'm staying home with the kids, it being the first day of spring break. I took care of a couple of things but I never got around to calling anyone for a playdate. The kids don't seem to want it, they prefer to stay inside. With any luck, I'll get out of the house to pick up a new printer cartridge so we can print out the posters for the Easter Egg hunt in the park this Saturday. AW can help me putting them up in the neighborhood.
I got one of those color printer cartridge refills last night at Target and, you know, I see why people wouldn't want to spend 14 bucks on them. To give credit, it may be that my old cartridge is just shot, but you don't know that until you try to refill it. (The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any magenta ink in the cartridge, which means reds look a little, well, invisible).
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04:15 pm
[Link] | Well, I just got back from a five hour meeting off-site. Its good to get out of the office, especially when they feed you sandwiches at lunch time.
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02:39 pm
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Quonset huts
Its a pretty decent day out, for a change, so I went for a walk around the campus. I found a new canteen in the new building just down the street which sells a fine cup of coffee. It also doesn't seem to crowded for lunch so I might stop in later this week. On the way I noticed some quonset huts. I mean, I've seen them before, they've been there for about 50 years, most likely, but one of them is a two-story affair, in part. It looks as if two sections of hut was bolted together, one on top of the other. Which got me thinking, how many multistory quonsets are there left? How many were ever build in the first place?
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11:29 am
[Link] | My favorite thing to do for the last month or so is Sunday morning coffee and the NYTimes at the Zoma coffee house on Atwood. They have free wifi so I could bring the laptop and liveblog it, but that would be sad and pathetic.
This caught my eye in the Times--Geek Love, a tribute to Gary Gygax, who more or less invented the modern world. Complete with nifty diagram which doesn't make sense but looks really good. I was too old to actually play AD&D when it first came out, but I played Advent on an old CDC Cyber 75 back in the day, and I used to read a lot of SF as well. If only I'd bothered to learn Perl, I'd be a Master of the Universe by now. Or at least a chaotic lawful mage.
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03:27 pm
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Saturday afternoon
Pretty cushie afternoon. LW is taking AW and a friend to see the Spiderwick Chronicles while I'm at home with Emmie and her little friend. Both of them are playing dress up right now and other than a couple of pouty episodes (Emmie is kind of sensitive) and a loud and amusing round of "Go Away Your a Cookie", I've been able to just hang out with myself.
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06:42 pm
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Clients
I've used a lot of clients but this Deepest Sender extension for Firefox has to be about the best. Along with w.bloggar, of course.
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04:09 pm
[Link] | What with the cold and all the work, this has been one of the longest weeks I've had in a while.
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08:33 am
[Link] | Slate article on the Clover coffee maker,an $11,000 artisan coffee maker that gives the barrista full control over brewing time, water temperature, and amount of water for each grind and variety of coffee. In Madison, Ancora on King Street has one and I hear they charge $2.50 for a Clover cup and expect the machine to pay for itself in a year.
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08:16 am
[Link] | And this morning we had a bit of a fight because AW was slow getting and sat down to breakfast at about 6.40 when we have to leave for the bus stop at 6.55. Now, like all fights its stupid and looking back I should have defused things rather than standing my ground. After all, there are no 'winners' in a fight like this. Everybody is stressed out these days, or else sick, and LW is moreso than anyone else in the family. Afterwards I quietly told AW that he should help out by getting up when I ask him to on Monday. He said he would, because he didn't like that fight. That made my heart break, just a little.
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09:34 pm
[Link] | Did some dishes and folding the laundry tonight, and afterwards watched a little of Boogie NIghts on IFC. Great movie, cheesy soundtrack. The cold started get to me because I have't gotten nearly enough sleep the past few nights. So we turned in early.
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10:37 am
[Link] | Its a much nicer day today and I'm looking forward to a walk at noon. I never did return that library book so I have an excuse to go down to State Street. The state basketball tournament is at the Kohl Center today so there should be a bunch of fairly clueless people in letterjackets wandering around in groups of five. The workload crunch is a lot less today, I'm not as busy, so that feels pretty good.
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