In absentia
Gone fishin'. See you in a week.
Posted by ned at 04:38 AM
Whereby:
American English shall strive for the continued simplification of its accepted lexicon, contrariwise to its British counterpart;
sensible words in the English language have a pleasing ratio of letters per syllable and relative alternation of consonants and vowels;
and
the human eye naturally recoils from that which is ugly and offensive.
Be it hereby resolved that the word eighth shall hereby be considered ugly and offensive by virtue of a) its having six letters comprising one syllable, and b) its having four consecutive consonants.
Pursuant to this resolution of acclamation, the recipient of said resolution shall forthwith abstain from the use of the word eighth in all communications, public and private, real and imagined. Said recipient shall substitute the word oth in all circumstances from which the use of eighth is abstained.
On this, the eighteenth day of February, two thousand four.
Many thanks to friends both old and new for an enjoyable evening of pleasant company last evening, even if the afternoon was spent slaving for The Man. Soren pointed out in an email that Gombei is indeed in Meno Park as I had surmised, and Virgil's ratings are looking good indeed.
There's an interesting read in this week's New Yorker about Robert Kiley, the man hired to manage and/or save the London Underground subway system (The Tube). While the article mainly focusses on the political machinations behind recent efforts to right the listing Tube, it also offers a sobering and, in my experience, accurate depiction of the current troubles of the system. I lived in London in the spring of 1999 and spent a lot of time on The Tube doing the sorts of things Tube riders do: jockeying for optimal ingress and egress positions; standing on the right, walking on the left; ogling platform sweets dispensers; and cursing the despised "signal failure" (I note that the phrase has two meanings).
When I lived in London there were already efforts underway to improve aspects of its operation: the decaying Northern Line trains were in the process of being replaced, the Westminster station renovation was progressing (slowly) apace, and Jubilee Line stations were variously rent apart as part of the continuing line extension. Still, problems were hard to ignore. Leaving aside the bomb scares (real and threatened) that were common at the time, traveling by Tube could be an uncomfortable ordeal and near the end of my initial stay I often found myself walking rather than going Underground.
Irrespective of its faults, I love The Tube, or at least the idea of it. When will the reality match the ideal? Many aspects of The Tube seem impossible to change: the depth and limited girth of the tunnels would be prohibitively expensive and dangerous to modify, and the system's reliance on people movers in stations comes as a given. My occasional returns to London have offered encouraging signs, but it's hard to honestly say that monies have been spent where they were most needed. The Jubilee extension, for example, was completed at a fabulous cost but has done little to relieve the groaning intra-Circle Line system of any burdens, and its gleaming crystalline stations were often deserted when I journeyed to them. As the article points out, though, there is much hope to be found in the abandonment of the dreadful public-private partnership (P.P.P.) originally envisioned. Cheers, Underground.
Apparently I need to work on my reading comprehension skills: I completely failed to notice the note in the manual informing the reader that the CLZ instruction is only available on architecture version 5 processors, and all I have is a version 4T processor. Fortunately, I had a backup plan.
Three posts in one day? I'm as confused as you are.
While I can't object to Pepsi's choice to emulate Wes Anderson (cf. the activities sequence in Rushmore and family lineup in The Royal Tenenbaums) in their iTunes promotional ad, would it have killed them to use a decent font? Anderson wisely used Franklin Gothic in both of the aforementioned movies, whereas Pepsi felt it necessary to use what appears to be an atrocious knockoff of Lucida Grande. Maybe it's just me, but if I were to spend $2.1 million to air a commercial during the Super Bowl, I'd at least try to make my fonts look nice.
Landon links to a dictionary [PDF] of Seussian terms compiled by my alma mater. Although I'm still bitter that not even an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth could dissuade Theodore Geisel's widow from caving in to moneyed interests by authorizing positively execrable movie adaptations of two of her late husband's books.
Sam complained that I hadn't written in a while, so this is a minor attempt to rectify the situation. I apologize to my faithful reader (readers?) for not having done so earlier, but a certain little something has been quite demanding for the past few months.
Since I'm still taking notes for my promised cell phone review, about all I have to offer for your amusement are notes on a couple of movies I've rented. First off, the fabulous Croupier finally came out on DVD and I didn't even know until today. Another movie now available for home consumption is Spellbound. I brought out the dictionary for the final round and encountered some new words (hypsometer and apocope), as well as some old favorites (palimpsest and ecclesiastical, among others). Recommended.