Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of the defining cultural markers of my misspent youth despite the fact that I wasn't actually born yet when it came out. In celebration of this milestone Hyperion is releasing new editions of all five HHGTTG books, and a sixth book. Yes, really. It's ( Read more... )

I thought my Star Wars geek days were a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but apparently I was wrong. I can't wait to see this:

You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Star Wars: Uncut
However, my geekitude is sufficiently diminished that I am not even remotely entertaining the thought of participating.

( Read more... )

Being something of a word nerd, I subscribe to the OED word of the day. Often it's boring. Yesterday was "whip". If I'm not especially interested in the word and its origins I'll just delete it, but every so often I'll get something a little more interesting which makes the subscription worthwhile ( Read more... )

Thanks to the fine folks over at mental_floss, I just watched a woman talk about dictionaries for an hour, and I enjoyed every second of it. I have therefore provided it here for your edutainment. If you like that sort of thing. Otherwise, please disregard.

I love books. I love them almost as much, maybe even sometimes more, than I love food. I like to read them. I like to read about them. I like to think about them and talk about them and blog about them. I like to hold them. I like to smell them. I like to buy them and hoard them. I like to see them all lined up neatly on my giant bookshelf, each in ( Read more... )

I just found this article on the history and slow demise of the semicolon. An excerpt:

When the Times of London reported in 1837 on two University of Paris law profs dueling with swords, the dispute wasn't over the fine points of the Napoleonic Code. It was over the point-virgule: the semicolon. "The one who contended that the passage in question ( Read more... )

I am a nerd. This isn't news to anyone. The latest proof? Today I played and enjoyed Budget Hero, a little Flash game that has you play various policy cards to expand or reduce government spending and revenue. I increased spending on research, education, mass transit and foreign aid, which I paid for by revoking the Bush tax cuts, cutting military ( Read more... )

So I saw Return of the King at midnight last night, or technically this morning.
The short opinion is that it was a good flick, though rather long, and they did a pretty good job of adapting the books, though they could have done better. Now here's the long answer, with book and movie spoilers:
They got all the big events all right, with one ( Read more... )

LexisNexis is my god.