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Wonders of the Fruneaulogical World
Jan. 4th, 2008 02:07 amFukubukuro. Apart from the perverted-sounding name, I find this interesting because selling grab-bags used to be a fairly common practice when I was little. It's pretty much died out these days. Now I wonder if it was an idea the occupying troops brought back from Japan?
I'd like to see them again. Grab-bags are always fun if the dealer's honest about them. Radio Shack especially used to have good ones, filled with weird discontinued stuff, stuff in damaged packaging, and samples.
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Our Goodwill store never has live ordnance :/
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They're locking political opponents in buildings and burning them alive in Kenya now. I'd always considered Kenya an orderly sort of country, where that kind of thing didn't happen.
When I was a child, there was so much hope for the Anglophone ex-colonies: India, Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Burma, etc. To Americans, at any rate, these looked like young versions of the States. They were new and energetic countries, blessed with British law and philosophy, and with lots of help and encouragement available to them. They should have prospered. Where does the fault lie, I wonder?
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We're finally going back to paper ballots here, after the last six years of ill-conceived 'easy to use' voting machines. I still think that if someone's not smart enough to successfully operate a card punch or fill out a scantron form, then they have no business voting to begin with. There are some things that shouldn't be simplified for the benefit of the incompetent.
I'm just about willing to bet that the lines will move more rapidly with scantron ballots too.
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I've had a strange revelation about post-medieval texts. If you read, for example, "Wonders of the Invisible World" in the original typesetting, you'll see a lot of italic and capitals dropped into the text at odd points. It seems to break the narrative flow. If you read it aloud, though, and lightly stress capitalized nouns, and stress the italic bits (excepting the Latin phrases) a bit more heavily, it acquires a distinctive rhythm. This, I'm pretty sure, is the rhythm of Cotton Mather preaching. This is probably a 'Well Duh!' moment for Humanities majors, but it's complete news to me :)
It makes sense. They're from the age when not everyone could read (or afford books, for that matter), so those who could tended to read aloud to their fellows. These books were designed to facilitate that.
There'd have to have been some sort of markup language in use as well for sending texts to the printer. Odd to think that the beginnings of HTML may lie in 17th century religious tracts.
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It remains a lifelong source of delight and wonder that I can read the words of someone long dead, and know him thereby just as well as many of his contemporaries might have.
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It's hard from my 21st century perspective to read of someone being an 'anti-paedobaptist' without imagining wrong things :)
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I find myself already looking forward to the Olympics.
I'd like to see them again. Grab-bags are always fun if the dealer's honest about them. Radio Shack especially used to have good ones, filled with weird discontinued stuff, stuff in damaged packaging, and samples.
*****
Our Goodwill store never has live ordnance :/
*****
They're locking political opponents in buildings and burning them alive in Kenya now. I'd always considered Kenya an orderly sort of country, where that kind of thing didn't happen.
When I was a child, there was so much hope for the Anglophone ex-colonies: India, Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Burma, etc. To Americans, at any rate, these looked like young versions of the States. They were new and energetic countries, blessed with British law and philosophy, and with lots of help and encouragement available to them. They should have prospered. Where does the fault lie, I wonder?
*****
We're finally going back to paper ballots here, after the last six years of ill-conceived 'easy to use' voting machines. I still think that if someone's not smart enough to successfully operate a card punch or fill out a scantron form, then they have no business voting to begin with. There are some things that shouldn't be simplified for the benefit of the incompetent.
I'm just about willing to bet that the lines will move more rapidly with scantron ballots too.
*****
I've had a strange revelation about post-medieval texts. If you read, for example, "Wonders of the Invisible World" in the original typesetting, you'll see a lot of italic and capitals dropped into the text at odd points. It seems to break the narrative flow. If you read it aloud, though, and lightly stress capitalized nouns, and stress the italic bits (excepting the Latin phrases) a bit more heavily, it acquires a distinctive rhythm. This, I'm pretty sure, is the rhythm of Cotton Mather preaching. This is probably a 'Well Duh!' moment for Humanities majors, but it's complete news to me :)
It makes sense. They're from the age when not everyone could read (or afford books, for that matter), so those who could tended to read aloud to their fellows. These books were designed to facilitate that.
There'd have to have been some sort of markup language in use as well for sending texts to the printer. Odd to think that the beginnings of HTML may lie in 17th century religious tracts.
*****
It remains a lifelong source of delight and wonder that I can read the words of someone long dead, and know him thereby just as well as many of his contemporaries might have.
*****
It's hard from my 21st century perspective to read of someone being an 'anti-paedobaptist' without imagining wrong things :)
*****
I find myself already looking forward to the Olympics.
