waste

Why aren't all bikes girl bikes

given that there's nothing really to be gained from having a gonads-threatening bar up there?  I actually recently learned the shocking answer, but refuse to tell it, having decided instead to furnish you with a description of a SCENE I would like to see filmed and shown.  In it, a centurion would apprehend an early Christian for some trumped-up reason, and ask him what the big deal with this Jesus character was.  EC explains that he was god; centurion says it's an unimpressive god that allows himself to be crucified among thieves.  EC explains he was a god as became man.  So which was it, C demands to know?  Slaps the christian.  God!  *slap* Man!  *slap*  God! *slap* Man!  Etc.

Notes towards a ridiculous summer reading list

First, it occurred to me that, in so far as Thucydides had to leave the army, The Peloponnesian War is a history written by a loser.  But I'm not going to read that over the summer; I'm just mentioning it because I can't find my fucking Aristotle!  I know that I have both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, but I can't locate them.  At first I was inclined to blame my organizational scheme (Greek drama, Homer, Thucydides, and Virgil in translation go here, but Virgil in Latin goes with Horace and Catullus go there, along with Ferdinandus Taurus and Famous Women and reference books; Plato goes yet there and shares the space with a collection of Hellenistic writings.  Of course!), but now I think it might just be because he's in socal.

Second, although it's not listed here, my first order of business following the dawn of a new day in Deutschland will be to purchase this fine-looking supernatural thriller.  I was going to make fun of the description for calling the unfortunate Frau "unschuldig" instead of outright innocent, but then I recalled that "innocent" and "unschuldig" are basically identical structurally.  Stupid etymology!  Onward:

Fancy indeed

I just noticed, watching Deadwood, the list of "Fancy Drinks" behind the bar at the Gem, which includes the Blue Blazer—somehow I can't see it being ordered, or prepared, there.

They also serve absinthe!

A question concerning quotation

Henry Fielding is pretty inconsistent about putting direct quotation in quotation marks and leaving indirect quotation out, as we can see illustrated by these two adjacent paragraphs:

"As to the meritorious part," he said, "he readily agreed with the captain; for where could be the merit of barely discharging a duty? which," he said, "let the world [sic] charity have what construction it wouold, it sufficiently appeared to be from the whole teneor of the New Testament.  And as he thought it an indispensable duty, enjoined both by the Christian law, and by the law of nature itself; so ws it withal so pleasant, that if any duty could be said to be its own reward, or to pay us while we are discharging it, it was this.
"To confess the truth," said he, "there is one degree of generosity (of charity I would have called it)..."

What's the deal?  I don't remember such quotational eccentricity in Tristram Shandy.

Now that's customer service

I filed a bug report against audacious relating to the loading of large files and, when I reopened it yesterday after finally trying the suggested fix (which didn't work), one of the developers added not one but two patches to the source tree to resolve it, and made an ebuild file so that Gentoo would know what version's installed.  Dedication!

Paper title!

"Sartre Resorted".  Maybe it needs a subtitle or something like that to convey what it would actually be about, but I don't really know what that might be.  All I know is that if I were the editor of a journal, I would instantly accept a paper so titled, without so much as a first thought, even if it actually consisted of nothing but a long description of an X-ray of Harry Nilsson's liver.

More Scott Walker

A performance of "Rosary" on Jools Holland's show.  Note that despite the comment saying that it's "EXACTLY like on record", it actually isn't, as you can notice most cleary in the line "I gotta quit".  The song "Boy Child" from Scott 4, and the song "Sleepwalkers Woman" from Climate of Hunter (featuring Evan Parker), for your comparing pleasure.