I finished reading Marvirinstrato, which is a collection of original short stories in Esperanto by my friend Tim (some have won prizes in the big annual Esperanto literature contest). He self-published the book, using one of these online print-on-demand houses (in fact, probably Amazon.com, I think?) but the quality of the physical book (paperback ( Read more... )

As I said a couple months ago, I went to visit crankyotter in LA for roadtripping to Grand Canyon and environs. I posted pictures on Facebook -- partly because I do it easily from my phone while we were still on the trip -- but I figured that I should share some here. I guess I'll just share the ones from Facebook -- together we took soooo many pictures, it ( Read more... )

Anyone want to see Let the Right One In at Coolidge Corner's midnight film series? The original title is Låt den rätte komma in -- it's a Swedish pre-teen vampire movie.Ĉu iu [proksime al Bostono] volas spekti la filmon Lasu la ĝustan eniri ĉe la meznokta film-serio de Coolidge Corner? La originala titolo estas Låt den rätte komma in -- ĝi estas ( Read more... )

When I was in highschool 16 years ago, I remember hearing that Jules Verne had started a novel about a group of researchers who were commissioned to go into the heart of Africa and who used Esperanto to communicate with the locals. The unfinished manuscript had turned up in 1981 and it was assumed that it had not been completed because of his ( Read more... )

I have a question. With films, you can talk about pacing: a movie can be edited to an appropriate length; you can talk about the amount of time spent on this scene or that scene. With a novel, I assume that you can also talk about pacing: a story could be written in 50 pages, but instead it's 400; and the events are distributed in a particular ( Read more... )

I know that you're all expecting me to post something about the Colossal Squid (not to be confused with its smaller cousin the Giant Squid) which was caught last year in Antarctica and is now (as I type) thawing at Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand (check out the live webcam!). This is the sixth specimen of a Colossal Squid ever retrieved ( Read more... )

I'm headed to New Zealand this week, so to get me in the mood I thought I'd post some pictures from my New Zealand trip in 2005 (!). I noticed recently that I had cropped and scaled a set of pictures to post to LJ back then, but never did! You'll remember that I posted some pictures from that trip -- and if you're too recent a reader to have seen ( Read more... )

I finished reading Stanley Newman's Cruciverbalism (as I mentioned in a previous post). It was a much quicker read than Word Freak, being much shorter. It also has a different purpose and focus, but I found it interesting for similar reasons. It does give a quick but interesting overview of the history of the crossword puzzle and the community ( Read more... )

Today I finished reading Word Freak. (I already gave my first impressions in this post.) The second half was sprinkled with as much interesting facts as the first half, but it ended with less enthusiasm than during the start.Hodiaŭ mi finis legi la libron Word Freak. (Mi jam donis miajn unuajn impresojn en ĉi tiu enskribo.) Tra la dua duono ( Read more... )

As I mentioned, José Antonio Vergara gave his presentation from a larger AAAS panel on "English-Only Science in a Multilingual World: Cost, Benefits, Options". From the abstract of the AAAS talk was this, which intrigued me (particularly the last point):Kiel mi menciis, José Antonio Vergara faris lian prezentaĵon el pli granda grupa programero de ( Read more... )