Author Archives: Anton

tales from the black box

Wow. Shortly after Simon Ng posted this blog entry — . . . today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister’s former boyfriend. He told me he wants … Continue reading

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damned if you don’t

I’m likely to want to refer to this later: One of his friends was contemplating becoming involved in a drug-distribution scheme, and telephoned Nguyen for advice. After a lengthy conversation, Nguyen advised the friend to stay away from the scheme, … Continue reading

Posted in drugwar | Leave a comment

adventures in fruit

New experience of the day: I found a little white spider in a bunch of Mexican grapes.

Posted in general | 2 Comments

a gap in the library

Latin ecce, Italian ecco, Russian vot, French voilà, Esperanto jen — the nearest English equivalent I can think of is lo!, which is not in most bilingual dictionaries, for the same reason English-speakers know the word voilà. So how do … Continue reading

Posted in language | 3 Comments

font moan

I moved from Mozilla to Firefox and found that the font menu has changed. I don’t know where each app looks for its fonts; they’re not neatly integrated in Linux as in MacOS. I don’t like any of them as … Continue reading

Posted in neep-neep | 1 Comment

Why can’t the English learn to speak?

Got an idea just now that might sell a few copies: Monty Python Annotated for Americans, containing answers to such questions as “What dialect is Palin doing in this bit?” This thought was prompted by watching My Fair Lady. In … Continue reading

Posted in cinema, language | Leave a comment

our little medium is all grown up

Got a junk call (from 214-279-0990) just now on my mobile telephone. I think it’s my first ever in seven years. In unrelated news, the humidity that was just barely unpleasant earlier today is now coming down as a very … Continue reading

Posted in California, spam | 9 Comments