Category Archives: humanities

letters on sticks

Ian Frazier visits a typewriter wizard (Atlantic Monthly, 1997). Martin Tytell has stories to tell about converting typewriters for other alphabets: There he received his hardest job of the war – a rush request to convert typewriters to twenty-one different … Continue reading

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not French, dammit (not that there’s anything wrong with that)

In the first few minutes of my new temp assignment, two people said: “You must be Antone? Antoine?”

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looking at us from Cydonia

Found in the archives, 1998 April 06: JPL has now released a processed image of the Face on Mars. . . . It looks nothing like a face. Is too! It’s a face whose left side shows the ravages of some disease, … Continue reading

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meet Madhu Kurup

Thursday I had dinner with Madhu Kurup at Amarin, a Thai restaurant in Mountain View which neither of us had tried before; he didn’t comment on his, but my dish (spicy chicken with cashews) was quite satisfactory. If you read … Continue reading

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meet Mary Rosh

Oh dear: John Lott, scholar-darling of the Gun Lobby, may be dirty. (Julian Sanchez of Cato broke the story.) I hope the Gun Lobby (statist-speak for all of us who don’t buy the victim-punishing dogma of Feinstein, Schumer, Brady et … Continue reading

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with all due respect

This rant by Llewellyn Rockwell makes me curious: who was the last President to be booed while addressing Congress? I’d be surprised to hear that it has never happened, because the cult of the office was not so strong in … Continue reading

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I do not talk funny!

Learn new words from the (US) Dialect Survey Results. (I wish there were some factor analysis.)

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