waste

Something something Augustine something disenchantment

A comment on mefi contains the happy typo "secularized debt". Please imagine a clever riff based on it here.

Someone get P.D.Q. Bach on the line

I have an idea for a bawdy multiphonic choral piece about onion-bukkake to be called Sperm in Allium.

What can one not have have heard about the archaeologist who wore a party dress to the excavation site?

The one.

Live/Evil

I had jury duty today. It was anticlimactic: after an hour and a half, everyone was dismissed. Where's the justice in that?

As advised, I brought with me ample reading material. Yet none of it satisfied. Everything I had left me wanting more, and, at that, more luridness. A bookcase at the back of the jury waiting room held out hope, and satisfied it. I took my book back with me to my table and set into some really bad writing and characterization. I had only got eleven pages in before being dismissed, but that was enough to learn of Sam, the high-powered conservative NYC talk-show host who listens to Dylan, the Boss, and Toby Keith (being a plumber's son with Jersey in his heart and his heart in Jersey, wheresoever else in Manhattan the rest of him might be), thus establishing that, although he acts in accordance with Mammon's dictates, he does not act from them, that he thinks this of the death threats that, as a prominent right-winger in New York, he receives nearly constantly: Since Sam was a firm believer in the right to bear arms, as well as carry them, he wasn't fazed. (Kathleen O'Reilly, Beyond Seduction, p 11)

What a bold interpretation!

Narrowly averted

So, Double Dactyls. Pretty sweet, no? Here we see a bunch of Latinists nerding it up with classics-themed examples. (My favorite two are the ones whose hexasyllabic words are "antejentacular" for the one and "aviannutritive" and "multihellenicide" (look at the showoff, including two, if you count "aviannutritive" as a word in its own right and not just a mishyphenated compound) for the other.)

In the very near past the following three things struck me, in this order:

1. "Nonobservational" is hexasyllabic and can be massaged into being pronounced as two dactyls without two much damage done.
2. "Elizabeth Anscombe" is not a double-dactylic proper name, but "Anscombe, Elizabeth" is.
3. Is there any possible better candidate, at least given the foregoing, for the first line, which is supposed to be "repetitive nonsense" along the lines of "higgledy-piggledy", than "Wittgenstein Wittgenstein"? There is not.

Fortunately, before things could progress much further, I realized that allowing that (viz., further progress) to happen would certainly result in my becoming someone no one wants to talk to at parties, or in my being consigned to some yet more horrible fate.

The fact that things went unchecked so far is cause for concern, certainly certainly.

An end to one form of jesuitry

At one point I had a lovely view out of a north-facing window; it opened out onto the OED, and occasionally I would field a request from people on the southern side of my house to look through it, so I'd open up one of the south-facing windows and give them a telescope so they could see the particular word they wanted to have defined. Naturally, I never stored any (ok, much) of the data that could be gleaned from my view in my own home. I just let people look through my conveniently unobstructed living room.

But not anymore! The OED people complained. Oh well! Over four years of access ain't bad. One wonders what finally tipped them off. (But not because one has anything nefarious in mind, of course—never that. (Really.))