An anarchist who uses the Internet is as hypocritical as a Protestant who uses the Latin alphabet. ( . . more . . )

I see I haven’t mentioned here that Charlie Stross’s novel Saturn’s Children is printed in modified Bembo, with single-loop ‘a’ and hook-tailed ‘gy’. It’s remarkable how much the page color is affected by those three letters.

I’m reading Ken Macleod’s novel The Execution Channel (Tor hardcover 2007). It appears that someone replaced every ‘fi’ or ‘fl’ with a ligature, without checking case.

I don’t care to log in at Kos for one comment, so I’ll put it here.

Daily Kos writes:

What natural means isn’t specified. But I’m sure there’s an Tex-aytollah somewhere ready to let us know.

Allow me to suggest ayatexah. Besides letting the /t/ and the last /a/ do double duty, it preserves the tatpurusa structure of the original: an ayatollah is a something-or-other of God, an ayatexah is a something-or-other of Texas.

Does Spanish normally use apostrophes at all?

A quirk in DVD subtitles: a phrase like “ten minutes before seven” is consistently rendered as 10 minutes before 7:00. Why not go all the way and make it 6:50?

I am amused to find that

1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00

takes exactly as many characters as

one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve

Someone recently told me that it’s easier to memorize a sequence, such as a text, from the end: when you recite it you’re moving toward familiar ground. Friday I gave this trick a modest test, when I had to copy a 15-digit number from one place to another. It works.

Saturday I was having a snack in a public place and heard a mother and daughter at the next table speaking French. When the little one looked my way I made chit-chat in French, well enough that the mother asked whether I speak French routinely! In fact this was about my third French conversation in a year (and by far the longest).