So much for my belief that I have mostly eradicated my native accent...

What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Midland

"You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all ( Read more... )

I just got back from a nearly-three-week luxury cruise up the Danube with The Missus. Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna, Duernstein, Melk, Passau, Regensberg, Prague. The first and last stops featured multiple nights in a luxury hotel; the others were all on board the (equally luxurious) ship River CloudTrue confession: I'm 44 years old now, and this ( Read more... )

From rolanni:

Go here and look through random quotes until you find 5 that you think reflect who you are or what you believe. Repost in your journal. [NB: I took the first 5 that I firmly agree with... a slightly weaker requirement.]

I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Jerome K. Jerome (1859 - 1927), Three Men in a Boat, ( Read more... )

I have safely returned from my Hell is Travel excursion.

( Diabolical itinerary within... )

"It's no accident that Chauvin was a Frenchman."

-- George M. Taber, "The Globalization of Wine", chapter 22 in Judgment of Paris: California vs. Paris and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting that Revolutionized Wine. NY: Scribner, 2005.

Idea snagged from ctate: pick a popular song lyric, and run it through a machine translation program, going English -> German -> French -> English, just copying and pasting.

Here's what Babelfish gives me for my chosen lyric, despite the fact that I punctuated the lyric into complete sentences before starting:
( Read more... )

( Read more... )

(I posted the following 'review' of Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist to rec.arts.sf.written, but I thought I would also put a copy here, since there's very little overlap in readership.)

--
After several years' worth of promptings from the AlexLit recommender, various acquaintances, and a few famous advocates[1], I finally got around to reading Lud ( Read more... )

Here are the two unguessed SIP lists from my earlier quiz:

1. heptagonal room, imperial theologians, treasure crypt, master glazier, blind room are from The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco as translated by William Weaver.
   
2. voluble self, fixed land, golden roof, golden sky, low worlds are from Perelandra by C.S. Lewis. I was sure "fixed land" would ( Read more... )

calimac posted the following in kate_nepveu's LJ:

"Also interesting: Bilbo and Frodo never had any servants, at least not visibly. Unrealistic, given their wealth and their large elaborate house, but the author's crime - if any - is of rendering them invisible, not lording it over them ( Read more... )