textiplication.com

See?  And no one would want Ezra to stop blogging, right?  Go vote XKCD!

I don’t ask much of you, really I don’t, in exchange for the dozens of posts I contribute to the world every seven hundred days or so.  But now, I have a very important request.

You must, simply must, vote for XKCD in the 2007 Weblog Awards, Best Comic Strip poll.  Nothing else on the whole web gives you so tasty a bowl of goofy sentimentality,

 startling technical expertise,

not to mention combinations of the two -

.

So vote now! and 24 hours from now!

via S. Andrew Swann

 66,000 of them.

Link to The Institute For Figuring // Online Exhibit: Mathematical Paper Folding

H/T to Pyegar.

Lijit totally rocks… It’s not that I couldn’t figure this out myself, but I love the weekly e-mails that tell me my top searches:

1. “skott klebe” (1 time)
2. fucking primary sources Peter the Great (1 time)
3. shark hybrid (1 time)
4. compare the movie to the book Flowers for Algernon (1 time)
5. ate AA batteries (1 time)
6. human hybrid (1 time)

I mean, as long as searches 1 & 2 weren’t originally concatenated together, there’s no downside!  All knowledge is good.

Now, on to your queries.

#1, guilty as charged.  How can I help you?

Mr or Ms. #2. I am sorry, but I do not understand your request.  Comma positioning could make all the difference, as could a subject or an active verb.  Consider rephrasing.

#3. I continue to surprised at the ongoing volume of human-shark hybrid queries on this site.  Clearly I am addressing an unfulfilled need.  I guess it’s time to drop the news that I am in the process of setting up a blog for my occasional guest poster, Bob Selacchi, the Shark-Man of Sales, who’s way too busy with his schedule as Noted Sales Expert and Motivational Speaker to take care of mundane details himself.

#4. Although I have read every single version of Daniel Keyes’ story, Flowers for Algernon, including the novel published in tandem with the movie Charly, I have never seen the film.  I recommend the Hugo-winning novella over the novel, which takes rather too long to complete its circle.

#5. While I am aware that this site does have a post or two that would appear to be highly relevant to a search about eating AA batteries, I hope, whoever you are, that you found something that better addressed your direct need.

6.  Technically, a human-human hybrid would simply be a conventional child, wouldn’t it? Am I missing something?

37 Signals links to László Moholy-Nagy’s beautiful representation of the intricate structure of Finnegans Wake.   It’s fair to say that Joyce’s own model of the book was at least as complicated as this. 

There’s a row across the middle for Linguistic, but I’m not sure what the significance of it is.  Joyce’s linguistic experiments in Finnegans Wake are the most obvious experiment Joyce undertakes, and the greatest deterrent the book poses to the casual reader.  Or the at least moderately intent - I’ve tried to read Finnegans Wake any number of times, and never gone more than a hundred or so pages in before stopping.

There’s no apostrophe in the title, by design - it’s supposed to convey ambiguities of number and noun case.  Is it the Wake of one Finnegan, or many Finnegans? Or is it about the awakening of many Finnegans? 

You have to read every sentence they way you have to read the title.  Joyce had at least a passing familiarity with dozens of languages, and writes them into the English he invents for this book.

Link to László Moholy-Nagy’s visual representation of Finnegan’s Wake - (37signals)

They got it from Richard Kostelanetz, in a blog I’m definitely going to start reading.

Via Todd Wheeler, who got it from gwynnega - the wondrous LibraryThing provides a list of the books most frequently tagged as “unread”.

As gwynnega sez:

…Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those you own but haven’t read yet.

Interesting that gwynnega, rule-maker, specifies markup for indicating which ones you hated but none to show which ones you liked.  Clearly, these are books that you may have finished but that no one could like. 

Fie, I say!  Books which I reread I may be assumed to have liked.  If there are any books I liked but did not reread, I shall append a +.

Um.  On the rereading thing, I have some embarassing over-re-reading instances below.  The books I reread I tend to reread often.

Chris and Dave, you’re up!

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell **
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22 ****************************************
**************************************************
********************(actually, I read Catch-22 more than a hundred times between 5th grade and 10th.  I haven’t been able to read it at all for years.  Ten pages in, I’m just glancing at the right-hand page)

One hundred years of solitude + 
Wuthering Heights
Life of Pi : a novel
The name of the rose (I tried to read this the year it came out, when I was 16.  I probably wasn’t ready for it, and the ten pages or so of Latin knocked me out of the box.)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses **** 
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey **** 
Pride and prejudice*******
Jane Eyre
A tale of two cities
The brothers Karamazov+
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies + 
War and peace ****
Vanity fair
The time traveler’s wife
The Iliad **
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The kite runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great expectations** (both endings) 
American gods : a novel
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex +
Quicksilver ** 
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West …
The Canterbury tales
The historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man *** 
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange **
Anansi boys : a novel
The once and future king +
The grapes of wrath
The poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & demons
The inferno ***
The satanic verses
Sense and sensibility **
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park +
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s travels
Les misérables
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune **************************** (Can’t really even tell how many times I’ve read it.  Not as many as Catch-22, though.)
The prince +
The sound and the fury
Angela’s ashes : a memoir
The god of small things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon ****** (In fact, it’s one of the books I’m in the middle of right now.)
Neverwhere *****
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being **
Beloved : a novel
Slaughterhouse-five ****
The scarlet letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Pu…
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas : a novel
The confusion **
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger abbey
The catcher in the rye ****
On the road
The hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of…
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into …
The Aeneid **
Watership Down ********************** (Like Dune, I read my first copy until the cover was nothing but masking tape.  I have no idea how many times I’ve read it, but NAMAC-22)
Gravity’s rainbow *****
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its …
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield **
The three musketeers

Wasn’t as chilly as I expected.  I cleverly left my laptop transformer at Logan, so I only had power on the plane. 

Spent my 40th birthday on the plane home.  Didn’t sleep for 24 hours.  Tired.  Lost all my pronouns somewhere.

Work today, gone again tomorrow.

moose testicles

Thanks to Lijit for bringing this to my attention.