So I was thinking the other day that I'm hapless when it comes to certain things, and then I got to thinking about what "hapless" means. OED says it's a lack of "hap" or good luck. But for me "hapless" has a connotation of "helpless" as well. To be hapless is to be incapable. So there's an undercurrent of meaning here: "The only way I can be ( Read more... )

Thanks to some assistance from wrdnrd I got Google Analytics installed on my blog at the beginning of the month. Amongst other things it has reassured me that people are actually looking at the blog, but one of the cool features of Google Analytics is it shows you what search terms people have used in their search engines to find your pages. Most of the ( Read more... )

'Francine Porad of Seattle, Washington and past President of the Haiku Society of America says, "There are some people who believe any reference to human beings in a haiku turns the poem into a senryu. I disagree. In my opinion there should be no separation, is no separation between human nature and the world of nature ( Read more... )

"Internesia, n.: The growing tendency to forget exactly where in Cyberspace you saw a particular bit of information." -- Dave Birch

(Via Dave Locke on trufen.)

'Borage, incidentally, is said to be part of a complex piece of Cockney rhyming slang: "thyme and borage" - "thyme" punning on "time", borage rhymes with "porridge", hence the slang word for a prison term... '

-- Nic Farey on Facebook (comment on a post by Gary Mattingly with pictures of mullein and borage)

Okay, I've often wondered about the name Shagrat in Lord of the Rings. Now I've seen it argued that the name Halfast is in fact Tolkien's donnish pun on half-assed, but I have a hard time believing he meant to imply "rat-fucker" by Shagrat. Is there another meaning of "shag" that he was playing on? In the US there's the usage in the phrase " ( Read more... )

Brouwers Cafe announcement on Facebook: "We were approached to do a 4 square swarm party tonight. If we reach 50 4 square logins by 6, we'll extend happy hour drink prices until 7."

Come again? The happy hour part I understood, but not much else.

Now that I know that "listless" derives from a Middle English word, "list," that meant "appetite, craving; desire, longing; inclination," it strikes me that in this original sense the Buddhists would consider listlessness an ideal state.

"Listless" is an odd word, isn't it? What's the etymology? I like the idea that one is lacking a list, therefore lacking the focus to do anything.

In any event, that was my mood over the long weekend, although I actually got quite a bit done nevertheless. I worked all three days on my piece for the next Chunga, and I finished a draft. Problem is I ( Read more... )

On Sunday I watched Porco Rosso for a third time, after watching The Sky Crawlers for a second time. (A good pairing in that they both center on aerial dogfights in an alternate history.) This time I watched Porco Rosso with the English dub, which features Michael Keaton as Porco. Previously I had watched it with the French dub, which features Jean ( Read more... )