Booklist

I read the book If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino about six or seven years ago but there's this one passage in the first chapter that has always stuck with me and I was recently reminded of it by this quote in Crissy's tumblog.



The passage describes a jaunt through a bookstore and lists different categories of books that somehow ring very true (at least to me). I've been meaning to revisit this for a while and, well, here we are:

• Books You Haven't Read
• Books You Needn't Read
• Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading
• Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written
• Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
• Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
• Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered
• Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback
• Books You Can Borrow From Somebody
• Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
• Books You've Been Planning Top Read For Ages
• Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success
• Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment
• Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case
• Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer
• Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves
• Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
• Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread
• Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them
• New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You
• New Books by Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general)
• New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you)

IM Funny

This is the best idea for a niche blog ever: I'm Blog posts screen shots of user-submitted instant messaging conversations. I just read them all. Hi-larious. The end.

The Very Rev Hon Maj Gen Col Dr Baroness

The ridiculously comprehensive list of titles you can select for yourself when registering in the British Airways website:


(click for bigness)

Wow that's politically correct. That said, I now aspire to be a Jonkheer. What do you want to be when you grow up?

Via Tech Bee (via 37 Signals)

Scrabulicious

Here are some moves I tried playing in Scrabulous and was pleasantly surprised to find were actual word. And their definitions.


Cadge [kaj] - verb: 1. To ask, expect, or encourage another person to pay for or provide one's drinks, meals, etc. 2. To beg.

Fohn [feyn] - noun: A warm dry wind coming off the lee slopes of a mountain range, especially off the northern slopes of the Alps.

Frig [frig] - verb: 1. To copulate. 2. To masturbate.

Ju•gum [joo-guhm] - noun: The posterior basal area or lobe in the forewing of certain insects, sometimes serving to couple the forewings and hind wings in flight.

Kip [kip] - noun: 1. The hide of a young or small beast. 2. A bundle or set of such hides. 3. A unit of weight equal to 1000 pounds (453.6 kilograms). 4. A paper money and monetary unit of Laos. 5. A place to sleep; bed.

Squill [skwil] - noun: 1. The bulb of the sea onion, Urginea maritima, of the lily family, cut into thin slices and dried, and used in medicine chiefly as an expectorant. 2. The plant itself. 3. Any related plant of the genus Scilla.

Ze•in [zee-in] - noun: 1. A soft, yellow powder of simple proteins obtained from corn, used chiefly in the manufacture of textile fibers, plastics, and paper coatings. 2. A synthetic fiber produced from this protein.

P.S. Please no "OMG I can't believe you didn't know was a word, you're so stupid!" comments. I've already fessed up to my ignorance, thank you very much.

"lITERALLY"

When I tell people I have a blog and they ask me what it’s about I usually come up with something like “I kind of post about all the neat and awesome stuff I find on the internet. Especially if it has pretty pictures.” Needless to say I don’t really have a terse and concise way of describing exactly what it is I blog about. This however is certainly not the case for the next few blogs I want to tell you about. These are extremely niche blogs whose writers have an almost rabid, rather remarkable obsession with their specific subject (more like pet peeves than subjects, really), rarely, if ever, shifting their focus. They all deal with some sort of linguistic faux pas (be it punctuation, capitalization or misuse), instances of which they systematically catalogue and ridicule. My kind of people! Let’s have an in depth look:

Blog: The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
Tagline: Making fun of bad punctuation since 2005
Blogger: “Bethany”
Examples:

• Home made “soup”
• Danger, “men working” above
• This is America, when ordering we "speak English"

Blog: lowercase L
Tagline: Ever notice hand-written signs with letters in all-caps, except for the letter L? It looks like an uppercase i ... WHY DO PEOPlE WRITE lIKE THIS?
Blogger: William Levin
Examples:

• PlEASE ClOSE THE DOOR.
• FREE DElIVERY.
• THE PHARMACY IS OUT OF PlAN B.

Blog: Literally, A Web Log
Tagline: An English language grammar blog tracking abuse of the word “literally”
Blogger: Fitz
Examples:

• "…and they thought we were literally two peas in a pod."
• "It’s literally raining cats in the Puget Sound area, as local shelters are overrun with felines."
• "Villanova basketball star Allan Ray had his eyeball literally poked out of its socket by an opposing player in a recent game."

THOSE BlOGS ARE lITERALLY THE MOST “AWESOME” THINGS I HAVE “EVER” SEEN.