is a chador the same as a burqa?

Posted on Sunday, 2003 January 05 by Anton

Kathy Kinsley relays a cheering rant from Iran.
(Link updated 2004 Oct 06.)

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disguised as a TARDIS

Posted on Sunday, 2003 January 05 by Anton

The BBC has won a legal dispute with Scotland Yard over the trademark of the blue box. (From Plokta)

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and then there’s the Rule of Five

Posted on Saturday, 2003 January 04 by Anton

Just found again, by chance, something that crossed my mind the other day. The author of The Bible Code responded thus in 1997 to the obvious criticism that you can find anything if you massage random data enough: “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I’ll believe them.” So, for those who haven’t seen it already, or misplaced the bookmark: Assassinations Foretold in Moby Dick.

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hwæt!

Posted on Friday, 2003 January 03 by Anton

Hrodulf the Red-Nosed Reindeer: An Original Old English Poem

Hwæt, Hrodulf readnosa hrandeor–
Næfde þæt nieten unsciende næsðyrlas!
Glitenode and gladode godlice nosgrisele.
. . . .

This came to me by mail some weeks ago, with the funny letters mangled beyond my ability to decipher. Here it is in all its glory.

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1892

Posted on Friday, 2003 January 03 by Anton

John J. Miller alerts us at The Corner that John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born eleventy-one years ago today.

Which reminds me of yet another of my oddball notions. I don’t like the word eleventy-first (or even twenty-first), because the root of first has nothing to do with ‘one’ let alone ‘one more’: it is related to foremost. Why don’t we say twenty-oneth or twenty-next?

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orcses is peoples too, preciouss

Posted on Thursday, 2003 January 02 by Anton

Better late than never– Garrett Moritz responds (June 19) to Elvish propaganda:

Elves want to save the world because it is a world that benefits them, and they’ve constructed a useful typology of good and evil which serves their ends. Of course the elves don’t want change, safe in beautiful country-club-esque forest homes like Rivendell while everyone else scrapes by in the dirty, muck-a-day world of Middle Earth. When it comes down to it, the one thing the Elves really do seem to care about is keeping everyone else out of their beautiful forests.

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women’s mysteries

Posted on Thursday, 2003 January 02 by Anton

Every issue of Cosmo seems to have an article about “what he secretly yearns for you to do to him in bed but won’t tell you”. I wonder how many such Secret Sex Tips there are – in other words, how often they recycle.

I, of course, secretly yearn to know what they suppose I secretly yearn for.

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