September 2010
21 posts
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forty-shilling words
the f-word season premiere takes us to the f section of the dictionary of jamaican english (2002). there we encounter such doozies as a valuable synonym for truthiness, what it’ll cost you (in shillings) to utter an obscenity around the authorities, and what to yell in a crowded bar when you are thirsty for your third slippery nipple and nobody is paying any attention to you. let’s...
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"...it became what you might call a smelly pack."
in regards to this.
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my onetime favourite author reviews my onetime...
“This book is a torrent of trash, dialogical diarrhea, the automatic produce of a prolix typewriter.”
said vladimir nabokov of catch-22
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from vladimir nabokov: the american years by brian boyd (1991)
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braver new world
when i’m reading a novel with an ending so depressing that it rocks my faith in humanity and flushes me into a month-long depression, the only way that i am ever able to bring myself out this viscous cycle of self-loathing and misanthropy is to dial up fanfiction.net and read over the cockamamie, home-brewed alternate endings written by fans.
here is the shocking conclusion to a brave new...
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my clumps, my clumps, my lovely lady clumps
when i get on my internet bully pulpit and tell people to do things, i usually don’t expect that anyone will listen. and yet when i gave you the preposterous assignment of writing a short story with the 19 words of the word summer series, my voice was heard—all the way in ankara, turkey by not one but by two of its most accomplished residents.
there, my former orthodontist (mrs. tragos) and...
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wherein lewis carroll gets all emo over the sight...
[Carroll] was overcome by the beauty of Cologne Cathedral. I found him leaning against the rails of the Choir, and sobbing like a child. When the verger came to show us over the chapels, he got out of the way. He said that he could not bear the harsh voice of the man in the presence of so much beauty.
from: life and letters of henry parry liddon (1904).
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peculiar starting player rules
i played pandemic for like 16 hours yesterday. what really tickled my crinkle-cut pickle was the rule for determining which player gets to start first. in most games the starting player is selected either randomly or who is oldest. in pandemic it is determined by who was most recently sick. orson, who had his bowels scrambled by salmonella in thailand, was the lucky person who got to start.
after...
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ragbag bags
through my masculine wiles, i have landed a part-time gig as a writer of reviews and a reviewer of writings (more on this later). i’m a touch apprehensive about this new post because i don’t really have opinions on anything and the opinions that i do have are usually unconsidered and almost always extreme (because that is the way that i live my life). therefore, to help me get into a...
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words wholly unrelated
asia & malaysia
throughout vietnam, there were only three different commercials that ran on the only english movie station. one was for a brand of point and shoot camera, one was for a brand of toothpaste, and one was for malaysia tourism. its tagline was malaysia: truly asia and after about the fiftieth repetition, i began to hum along as if it was my favourite song on earth and i was really...
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language silhouettes
okay, okay. this will be the last time that i blast you in your face with word-number charts that i made on an airplane. for this final graph, i thought it would be a hoot to generate a kind of “silhouette” of the unique word length schemes of the numbers of each language.
notice how almost 60% of all german numbers are spelled with 14 letters. also—how half of all vietnamese numbers...
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