I am probably a deeply weird person, belonging to one culture but knowing enough of a different one to be able to get jokes and allusions and stuff. But I feel even weirder when I seem to get more of another culture than someone belonging to it.

I'm reading a mystery, and a character in 1997 says how she went to an old people's home to visit a ( Read more... )

Now, why hadn't I paid attention to the fact that ODNB has free podcasts& *grabs podcasts*

Thisl made me think about diaries and whether they are meant to be read by other people. I've been keeping a diary for the last twenty years, writing more and more regularly and in detail with each year. Who am I writing for? I am perfectly aware of the significance of diaries as a historical source. One of my favourite books while I was a teenager ( Read more... )

According to this site in 1999 the quiz they have posted was randomly tried on college seniors, and the average score was 53 per cent. Of course I had to try. ;) I got 26 out of 34 right which is, I think, 76 per cent - and I never even studied US history (so didn't get some of the easy questions, it seems). Funny.

Go to Wikipedia. In the Search box, type your birth month and day (but not year). List three events that happened on your birthday. List two important birthdays, two interesting deaths and one interesting holiday. Post this in your journal.I tried to find out such things long before I had Internet... I knew about Mitterand being born on the same ( Read more... )

A couple of years ago I was taking an English exam for my postgrad studies. Now, I know English reasonably well so there shouldn't have been a reason for worry - and still I almost ended with apoplexy, and the reason for this was the exam question ( Read more... )

I've been rereading a book about archives and archive work which I haven't opened in about ten years, and this time I suddenly started thinking: how will archiving change in the age of computers? How, for example, will future historians of literature publish some writer's letters if this writer mostly wrote emails? Emails are easier to lose, easier ( Read more... )