I finished reading Walden, Henry David Thoreau's 1854 autobiographicophilosophical manifesto, a few days ago, I think on Wednesday. I have an interesting kettle of feelings about it.

I was all set up to find it unbearably preachy and hypocritical, as well as poorly-reasoned, from my unfavorable impression of Civil Disobedience. But I have to ( Read more... )

On a couple of occasions in the past I have posted here about encountering unusual languages on the subway: Hebrew and Hungarian here and Georgian here. On another occasion I talked about how the Web is catalyzing a renaissance of Deaf culture. This morning the two topics converged for me ( Read more... )

It had been known for centuries before the 1800's that some compounds of silver had interesting photosensitive properties, and some people had managed to make fleeting images from life using these properties, but these images could not be made to last. The substances in question were still photosensitive and labile; further exposure to light would ( Read more... )

This word mean "eat in one's sleep". The word is somnomulate. The Goog has never heard of it, so I'm claiming credit.

Judith is another story; this one sometimes gets called the world's first historical novel, since it was written about just-post-Captivity times, but the actual time of writing about four centuries later. It's not all that good; it's a war story about how a foxy Jewish widow wins a military victory by infiltrating the enemy camp and beheading the ( Read more... )

Carl Orff set a selection of medieval goliards' songs to music; his setting is the famous Carmina Burana. The first song is O, Fortuna!, which is pretty rousing, but seriously over-quoted by the entertainment industry.

I have been watching hilarious "misheard lyrics" videos of O, Fortuna! on YouTube. The original lyrics are in Latin and sung by ( Read more... )

I'm listening to the Red Sox play the Yankees on the radio, and I got curious about some details of the mechanics of batting, so I went to see what Wikipedia had to say. Once at the article "Batting (baseball)" I got distracted by a peculiar turn of phrase, in the following sentence:

Batting is often cited as one of the most difficult feats in ( Read more... )

I don't know exactly when Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, the fifth novel in the Tarzan saga, but since it was serialized in late 1916, it's likely that it was written earlier that year. Burroughs had a devoted following by then, and had a good relationship with his publishers, so a longer delay between writing and ( Read more... )

Is there a word that means "prone to procrastination"? I have found myself saying "procrastinaty" twice in the last two days.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, published in 1889, is a bridge between two phases of Mark Twain's writing career. I finished it last night and still am not sure what to make of it. I am pretty sure this is the first time I've gotten all the way through it, because the ending was surprising to me. I have a pretty good guess, too, ( Read more... )