Author Archive for paul

The Masochist’s Mixer: Sampling the Habanero Vodka

Published
by
paul
on October 14, 2007
in potables and comestibles
. 0 Comments

Habanero Vodka Sample Last night I transferred the bottle of habanero-vodka infusion into the freezer against tonight’s tasting . . . very cautious tasting, I might add. It was nicely chilled when I removed it and held it up to the light.

The vodka has acquired a very faint orange tint and has become slightly cloudy with tiny, floating particulates. I decanted a small amount (about a half-ounce) into a shot glass. The smell is quite wonderful, quite definitely habanero with a faint sweetness.

M—— took the first sip and was immediately in dire straits. I had to fetch a salt shaker for her, and fast. (This, by the way, is a good tip: If you eat something that’s painfully spicy, don’t reach for your water glass, which is about as effective as throwing water on a grease fire. Heavily salted tortilla chips are much more effective.) Her report: undrinkably painful, but with interesting potential.

I took a sip.

Hot sauce vendor Dave, of Dave’s Insanity Sauce fame, claims to have developed his concoction as a method of “encouraging” drunken, troublesome patrons to leave his bar. I suspect this vodka could be turned to similar ends, or possibly used as a weapon for interpersonal combat.

My initial impression was of a surprisingly tasty industrial solvent. I was extremely glad that the sip was a very small one. It took a moment for the sensation of heat to arrive, but arrive it did. The powerful burning sensation was most pronounced on the roof of my mouth and my lips. The strength of the infusion had become much hotter than I expected in such a short amount of time. Even though it was not unbearably painful, it felt a bit as if my palate were dissolving. I decided to exercise caution before proceeding.

I fetched a bowl of tortilla chips and doused them with salt, then added more salt. M—— immediately began consuming them.

Thus fortified, I ventured a second sip. While the potency of the capsaicin is certainly foremost in the experience, the flavor is actually quite good, with a curious sweetness lingering on the tongue. The flavor melds quite well with the salty corn of the chips, and it does indeed have a lot of potential.

For any sort of reasonable use, this batch will need to be diluted. I suspect that around 2–3 parts pure vodka to 1 part habanero infusion will be about right for use as a drink mixer . . . this will make a mean bloody mary. (M—— indicated that it would have to be 3:1 before she would consider trying it again.) This could work well in recipes, as well. I’d like to try using this in a marinade for a fish, perhaps striped bass.

Oh, and I did finish the sample, sipping slowly. I’ve always loved hot sauces that were more than a bit too hot to be comfortable, and this brought back memories of sitting in my dorm room in college with a bowl of chips and a bottle of Inner Beauty Real Hot Sauce.

Post Scriptum: It seems that Inner Beauty, alas, is no longer being produced. Perhaps I’ll use up a few of my habaneros on this recipe for a home-made substitute.

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Mind Performance Hacks: Review and Manifesto

Published
by
paul
on October 11, 2007
in books, mental exercises and zenoli
. 0 Comments

Mind Performance Hacks CoverMy copy of Mind Performance Hacks has been sitting by my chair in the living room for some months, waiting for me to spend some serious time digging into its contents. I picked it up again this past weekend, and was once again impressed with the density of surpassingly cool information packed therein.

The book is perfect for those with omnivorous interests who enjoy pushing the limits of their minds, but I’d venture to suggest that anyone with a modicum of curiosity will find a quite a number of things to pique their enthusiasm.  The book’s 75 short articles (called “hacks”, implying an attractive blend of usefulness, cleverness, and efficacity) are grouped into eight chapters: Memory, Information Processing, Creativity, Math, Decision Making, Communication, Clarity, and Mental Fitness.

Even though I’ve encountered many of the specific topics previously, I found plenty of material that was either new to me or contained interesting perspectives. For example, even though I’ve investigated shorthand systems I’d never paid much attention to Dutton Speedwords. I’ve played around with mental arithmetic, but I’d never encountered the divisibility tests for seven, eleven, and thirteen.

Simply placing all this material into close proximity invites experimentation. While I’ve read much about mnemotechnics, for example, I’ve only put some of the most basic techniques into practice, and never in any sort of systematic fashion. The book starts with a relatively simple pegwords example, then moves into more advanced material, including a system that purports to allow you to remember a list of 10,000 items.

Rather than write a single in-depth review of this book, over the next few months I plan to use the hacks in MPH as jumping-off points for posts, recording my experiences putting them into action. I’ll be ranging through the book freely rather than taking the entries in order.

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The soothing power of habanero vodka

Published
by
paul
on October 9, 2007
in potables and comestibles
. 9 Comments

Sliced chiliesThe garden is nearing the end of its season. The tomatoes have reduced their frenetic output to something nearly manageable, and the chilies are bright on the vine. This year, I have a disturbing number of habaneros . . . far more than is safe for any sane culinary pursuit. Happily, I am not excessively troubled with sanity, so I’ve processed the first batch and frozen them for the use during the long, coming winter.

Handle with careSadly, I’ve lost the little plastic tag that revealed the variety of the red peppers in the above photograph. They’re plenty hot, though not quite as fiery as their orange cousins to their right. It took about an hour and a half to sort through the harvest and prepare them for freezing. The garden also yielded several other kinds of peppers not pictured here, including a tasty Hungarian cultivar that fries up nicely and plenty of jalapeños. (A hint on jalapeños, by the way: if you grow them yourself, let them ripen all the way to bright red before harvesting. This adds a strain of sweetness to the heat, far superior to the watery, under-ripe green specimens you find in the the grocery.)

Handling cut chilies with bare skin is not recommended . . . really, not recommended. Despite a latex glove on my pepper-handling hand, my wrist was burning from the capsaicin spray after the first fifteen minutes.

Habanero VodkaI’ve been wanting to make some habenero vodka, so this was the perfect opportunity to experiment. I had a partial bottle of inexpensive (Gordon’s) vodka sitting around, so I popped sixteen quarter-pepper segments into around 400 mL. This is going to be hot! A sip immediately after I dropped them in had a faint heat to it, and another sample taken an hour later had a lovely burn.

The bottle is now sitting in the pantry, where it will infuse for several days before I take the next sample. I’ve seen suggestions that it sit up to half a year, but if I’m going to wait that long I’ll want to be a bit more certain of the results.

9 Comments

Bad revolting stars: an untold tale of woe

Published
by
paul
on October 7, 2007
in miscellanea
. 2 Comments

It has indeed been an ill-aspected tetrafortnight, and I shall not try the Gentle Reader’s patience with lists of my miseries and woes. Should you be a sympathetic soul who wishes to commiserate, you can soak up some of the atmosphere by listening to the duet “Woe” from P.D.Q. Bach’s half-act opera, The Stoned Guest. (I’m sure you’re not the sort of cad who’d try to find a torrented copy on Mininova. The Vanguard recording is still readily available, as is the printed score, and Prof. Schickele could probably use the royalties.)

Let’s be truthful, though—you likely wouldn’t be interested in my misfortunes, as your own may be much more pressing. Should they be threatening to overwhelm you, may I recommend . . . a woesary?

The Woesary

Pictured about is a woesary constructed by M—— (made, I have to admit, at my instigation). There are twenty-seven small and seven large beads. Attached to the bottom is an Unnecessary Weight.

Proper use is as follows: at each small bead, speak one of your woes, and cry, “Woe!” in a loud voice. At each large bead, hold forth with as full-voiced a “Woe!” as you can muster. If others are around (which makes the process much more cathartic, of course), encourage them to join in the wailing.

2 Comments

A Grumbling Emergence from Introversion

Published
by
paul
on August 20, 2007
in academia
. 0 Comments

My university’s summer class schedule is rather thin, and I’ve ended up taking my first online course. Looking back over the past weeks, I find that have learned two (2) things from this course: first, online courses are bollocks; second, I loathe academic software engineering.

I am deeply unimpressed by the “online class” experience. Perhaps the specimen to which I am currently being subjected is an unrepresentative sample, but I have to say it is woefully inferior to even a very bad classroom-taught (or “traditional”, as it is quaintly called) course. The “teaching” has been reduced to a few irregularly posted PowerPoint decks; I have no concept of who the teacher might be or if he is actually competent. Interaction with classmates is limited to that strictly necessary to complete assignments. There is little sharing of experience and less camaraderie.

We are required to use inferior web forum software for all course-related activities. This software lacks even rudimentary notification abilities, so one has to check several times each day to see if anything new has been posted (which it usually hasn’t). It logs one out after fifteen minutes, so every post is an exercise in frustration. It pops up dialog boxes with unhelpful diagnostic information every single, bloody login. It re-implements email! Even the teacher and T.A. can’t seem to use the “helpful class-management features” of the software to get grades posted properly, sometimes requiring three attempts. While the T.A. seems to be a reliable enough person, the overall impression of the course is of inferior technology and desultory disorganization.

Perhaps the state of online classes will be improved in five years; this one certainly does not seem to be ready for prime time. I’m seven or eight weeks into this course, and I could have learned just as much spending two days with Google Scholar and a list of a half-dozen seed papers (with much less exasperation and a far smaller outlay of cash).

The course topic (software testing) has not much helped my enthusiasm for this lackadaisical flapdoodle. This is the first software engineering course I’ve taken, and I have to say that it’s not doing a lot for me. The several dozen papers I’ve read are shining exemplars of Sturgeon’s Law. There are few interesting bits buried in the crud, but these are, by and large, derivative of more basic computer science results.

Don’t get me wrong; software engineering is a valuable (and, I assume, more practical than it seems from this course) discipline, but I’m deuced certain that I’ll be spinning my thesis topic in a much different direction.

0 Comments

Roma Revivens

Published
by
paul
on August 6, 2007
in miscellanea
. 3 Comments

Shinjuku LogloIn Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson posits a future where traditional nation-states have been superceded by FOQNEs: Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities. In this vision of shattered sovereignty, each bite-sized chunk of real-estate (called a ‘franchulate’) is the legal territory of its corporate parent, governed by its laws, and one may become a ‘citizen’ by paying appropriate membership fees.

FOQNEs were brought to mind when I did some research on Nova Roma this past week. I’m more than passingly familiar with historical recreation groups, having had an intermittent association with the Society for Creative Anachronism for the past twelve years or so. Nova Roma seems to be of the same ilk, focusing its efforts, as one might deduce, on classical Rome. Even so, the following passage on their wiki took me somewhat aback:

Roman Historical Recreation EventNova Roma is more than a historical recreation society, although we are that. We are more than a pagan religious organization, although we are that, too. We are more than a classical studies group, but that falls within our purview as well. We are nothing less than a sovereign nation; an attempt to re-create the best of classical pagan Rome (with a few compromises to modern times), and we invite you to join us by applying for citizenship today.

Surely, you’re saying to yourself, they can’t be serious. They’ve anticipated this reaction, and address your skepticism in their FAQ:

Are you serious about the sovereignty thing?

Yes, we are completely serious about our declaration of sovereignty. However, we are also very realistic and do not expect to function as an actual sovereign nation with our own territory in the foreseeable future. We look at it in three ways; as a long-term goal towards which we can reach, as a very convenient way to organize the administration of Nova Roma (especially given our Roman orientation), and as necessary for the full and complete restoration of the Religio Romana (since many religious duties were inherently tied to the State).

The SCA, while half-jokingly claiming to maintain the world’s largest private army and organizing itself via an elaborate system of kingdoms, baronies, shires, and so on, to the best of my knowledge has never claimed to be an independent nation. How are we to understand ’sovereignty’ in this sense?

In fact, there is a curiously vigorous stream of semi-secessionist movements of varying degrees of seriousness. Perhaps the best introduction to their variety is this Angelfire page on micronations, which groups these efforts into a taxonomy that includes self-proclaimed states (Sealand is the most famous of these), sedition and exile groups (including the impressively straight-faced Neue Slowenische Kunst movement), new country projects (Nova Roma is categorized here), United States tribal groups, model countries (including the SCA), and actual small countries (I retain a soft spot for the S.M.O.M.). The exuberant florescence reminds me very much of the panoply of constructed human languages, from Lojban to Esperanto to Klingon to Eaiea to DiLingo.

I’ll admit to some curiosity. Nova Roma doesn’t appear to have a strong Pennsylvanian base, but there does seem to be an active New York contingent. One of these days I’ll play the traveler and make the trek to the City for my chronicles. Perhaps they know more than they’re letting on: after all, ‘the Empire never ended’.

SPQR

[Image of Shinjuku Loglo courtesy KinkiMcG. Image of a recreation of a classical Roman festival courtesy Livia Drvsilla.]

3 Comments

Name That Font!

Published
by
paul
on July 27, 2007
in miscellanea and tools
. 0 Comments

For the non-specialist, trying to identify a font from a small sample is a nearly futile exercise, particularly if it is at all obscure. Most of us can manage to pick out fonts that have been overused to the point of banality (such as Times New Roman, or heaven forfend, Comic Sans). Wouldn’t it be nice if you could discover the name of a font given a sample?

A while back I discussed several tools for identifying music given only a few bars of a tune. During my font search, I happened across several resources to help you chase down an intinerant typeface.

Totally Automated Font Identification

Gulim Bold font sample, created with the Gimp

WhatTheFont should be your first recourse. You supply it with an image of a few characters of the font (ideally, tweaked to accomodate their usage guidelines). To test it out, I picked a relatively typeface that was installed on my system (Gulim Bold), and uploaded to the WTF website. I was immediately prompted with potentially identifications for each letter, which I then had the opportunity to correct. This was unnecessary, as WTF correctly identified each one.

Sample of Prima Sans provided by WhatTheFontNext, I was presented with a list of five matches. I was initially dismayed that Gulim Bold did not appear on the list, but upon closer examination, the first suggestion, Prima Sans Bold, is a dead ringer. I’d have to guess that Gulim is a not-very-subtle clone; I’d be very happy with such a close match if I needed to match Gulim for a project.

The next three choices (variants of Fago Ex) were quite close, but the ‘b’s clearly differ. The final choice, Pragmatica Bold, had the right ‘b’, but overall appeared to be a slightly lighter weight. Want to try the search yourself? Go to the WhatTheFont page, and provide it with the URL of the above Gulim Bold sample image:

http://www.zenoli.net/wp-content/2007/07/gulim-bold.png

Choose Your Own Adventure Font

Identifont takes another path. Rather than automatically analyzing an image, it asks you a sequence of questions about the characteristics of the font to be identified, much like a field identification guide for trees or twenty questions. You start by specifying which characters you have in your sample, to eliminate questions that you won’t be able to answer. After each answer you provide, it narrows the field of possible candidates; after you get through its list of questions, it presents you with its choices for the best thirty matches so you can eyeball them to see which looks like the best fit.

Again using my Gulim Bold sample, above, I walked through the series of fifteen questions. I was unclear on how to answer questions about several of the characteristics, so I selected the option indicating I was uncertain. Finally, I was presented with a list of fonts that seemed to have very little to do with each other and not much to do with Gulim Bold. I went back I tried answering the two questions I was uncertain about, but no luck, no matter which way I answered them. Sorting through the list of fonts was a pain, as well, as you have to click on each to view a sample.
My conclusion? All I know is that it didn’t work for one five-letter sample. For a better test, I might try it with a complete Gulim alphabet, or try another font. Regardless, if WTF doesn’t turn up any matches for you then this might be worth a shot.

Pre-Identified Gameshow Fonts

This is getting a bit specific, but if you’re looking for fonts that were used in a particular game show then a lot of your work may be done already. I’ve happened across collections of show title fonts, fonts used to display scores, and of other miscellaneous game show fonts.

(Oh, and Jeopardy!? There’s a simulacrum of the title font called ‘Gyparody‘, the clues are displayed something very close to in a face named ‘Enchanted‘, and player winnings were displayed [from 1975-1993] in Vane Type II. My information is not yet complete, though. I did find some speculations about the current winnings font and the face used to display categories, but nothing conclusive.)

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A Semblance of Order: Library Management

Published
by
paul
on July 23, 2007
in books and organization
. 9 Comments

[Updated 23 July 2007: Minor typographical corrections, added a mention of LibraryThing's CueCat offer, added a screenshot of the NYPL HLS.]

In which we examine LibraryThing, Delicious Library, and the New York Public Library Home Library System.

Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore?

—Henry Ward Beecher, 1855

The books continue to accumulate, despite a valiant effort at asceticism . . . I let my guard down for a moment, and there are another couple book-feet sitting on the coffee table. One must face up to the fact that a personal library is not a self-organizing phenomenon.

Well, perhaps that’s not strictly true, but the order that emerges tends to be less than helpful: if I’ve read it recently, it’s lying on some surface (perhaps, I’m sorry to say, on the floor by the bed); if I haven’t read it recently, it’s on a bookshelf somewhere; and if I want to read it, it’s in a box in the attic. It is that last category (and the fear that one of those boxes might actually be mouldering in the basement) that causes the most pain. Getting the books in order is moving up the priority list.

Like any good book-obsessed geek, I’ve been meaning to pick up a bar-code scanner to help automate the tedium of data-entry. Recently, I’ve read about video barcode readers that can pluck and decode the barcodes from a camera. Thus, like any good Linux geek (and being extremely cheap), I started wondering if there were any free or open source software packages I could appropriate. Today, I did some digging.

The best I could dredge up along those lines is /barCode, which looks a bit raw but could perhaps be coaxed to work on my XV6700. During my search, though, I happened across something not free but still quite impressive: Delicious Library.

Delicious Library

Delicious Library is a Mac OS X app with supremely spiffy, live, video barcode recognition. Despite my Linux ways, I’ve been playing around with a MacBook Pro that has an integrated camera, so I figured I’d give it a try.

Delicious Library Screenshot

I sat down next to one of my bookshelves and started scanning. It took a moment to find the right distance and angle, but very quickly there was a beep, and almost instantly DL had sucked down the information from Amazon, displayed a small image of the cover, and read out the title in a synthesized voice. Slick! I proceeded through the first dozen books on the top shelf: of these, three were unrecognized.

DL appears to be performing its primary lookups through the UPC code; as near as I can tell, you have to manually enter the ISBN to run a search if the UPC isn’t found. It took a bit of frustrated poking to figure out how to make that happen . . . for example, there’s no ISBN field visible on the book information entry panel, which was quite vexing. For pre-ISBN books, you appear to be completely out-of-luck. I wanted to just enter the title and have the program give me a list of possible matches from which to choose, but this doesn’t appear to be an option.

Once the books are scanned and recognized, they can be organized by creating shelves and dragging and dropping, but this is about the limit of the interactivity. Books can be rated and notes entered, but there’s no tagging that I could find. The Similar function can be used to list related books on Amazon, but any wishlist management would have to be delegated there; there’s no such capacity in DL.

One theoretically interesting feature is voice search: you can speak the name of any title in your library, and DL will pop it up. I didn’t find this particularly helpful or successful. You need to speak the full title (including subtitle, if any) at just the right speed. Some titles, try as I might, simply would not be recognized. Being able to speak a word or two and get a list of candidates would have been much more useful: if I know exactly what I’m looking for, I hardly need to search for it.

Delicious Library is $40, and the demo will let you scan up to twenty-five books before making you pay. If you’ve got a Mac, it’s definitely worth some experimentation. It allows full import/export, so it might be possible to use the free version to scan the easy parts of your library in 200-book chunks, to be imported into another application.

LibraryThing

Delicious Library’s scanning was quite slick, but I could already feel the limitations chafing a bit. I’d glanced at LibraryThing several times over the past few months, but had never felt a serious urge to try it out. Letting the world know what books I’ve purchased doesn’t seem to be particularly necessary. Today, though, the bit was in my teeth, and I plunged right in.

LibraryThing is completely web-based, with a strong social component (finding other people who own the same books, and so on). Sign-up is instant . . . to log on is to create an account, no email address required. As previously mentioned, I don’t yet own a barcode scanner, so ISBN entry was by hand. Typing ten digits by hand isn’t too hard, and very quickly the first book popped up. Once you enter a title, you get a list of matches; for any book for which I had an ISBN, there was only one option, which required clicking on a link.

The data entry flow was pretty smooth. I could leave the mouse hovering over the spot where the link would appear, and after each entry the cursor remained in the search box: type ISBN, hit return, click repeat. Some keyboard shortcuts are definitely indicated, though.

LibraryThing - Adding a Book

The particular bookshelf I selected (after the top shelf) included a few challenges, including relatively recent volumes, books from the fifties without ISBNs, and texts going back to 1871 (including several in Latin that were published in Germany).

Everything with an ISBN was recognized immediately and smoothly. LibraryThing allows searches by Library of Congress number (insanely cool) which handled the several mid-twentieth century books with ease (though I had to switch the search corpus from Amazon to the LoC, and LoC searches sometimes turned up several hits).

One exceptional feature is the ability to search the catalogs of dozens of different libraries, as well as international Amazon listings. Amazingly, I was able to scrape up information from around two-thirds of the nineteenth-century, Leipzig-published books from German libraries, though I had to correct an occasional date field. You can only search one library at a time, though, so I had to perform up to eight searches in some cases before I found a hit.

LibraryThing - Viewing my library

Like Delicious Library, LibraryThing offers a visual display of the covers in your collection (I assume it’s possible to upload covers for volumes that lack them, though I’ve yet to determine how.) The navigation is, unsurprisingly, not as convenient as the desktop application, and lacks the spiffy shelf graphics. There’s no drag and drop, either . . . this is a site that could use a good shot of AJAX.

More significantly, LibraryThing has no concept of shelving. It provides tagging, so I suppose one could approximate a filing system by tagging with shelf names or numbers. I found the tagging interface a bit awkward, though, and nowhere near as smooth as the data entry. Trying to tag multiple books at once involved lots of laborious clicking on tiny checkboxes, and it was very hard to manipulate tags directly. Also, I would have like to have the option of appropriating tags that other have used, rather than having to type everything myself from scratch. Perhaps theses features are there, but I’m not finding them.

I’ve not played much with the social aspects of LibraryThing, and the eclectic set of books I entered has not revealed my bibliodoppelgänger. I’ll be poking around some more over the next few days.

LibraryThing is ludicrously affordable: you can keep 200 books in your catalog for free; after that, it’s $10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime membership. They are also offering :CueCat barcode readers for $15, so $40 will get you either the current edition of Delicious Library, or LibraryThing lifetime membership plus a barcode reader.

In a few hours of playing around I scanned 86 books, and I’m deeply tempted to keep going. One of my key requirements, though, is keeping track of which book is in which box, and I’m not sure if the blunt instrument of tagging will be effective.

The New York Public Library Home Library System

I’m going to mention one more product, sold as Your Home Library: The Complete System for Organizing, Locating, Referencing, and Maintaining Your Book Collection This is a kit with personal library software, a binder with parchment-like paper for printing a permanent record, and a 128-page book on home library organization. Knowing my vices (and, I might point out, M——’s vices), my brothers gave us a copy for Christmas a few years back. I started a bit of cataloguing, but the sheer volume of the task militated against entering the entire collection.

New York Public Library Home Library System Screenshot

The included book is quite a useful little guide on categorization organization strategies and contains some painfully pointed advice on culling one’s collection. The software is written for Windows and Mac (and could probably be coaxed to run under Wine on Linux). Unfortunately, the package is from 2002 or so and written using FileMaker 6.0, and every bit of data entry is manual. It also takes over your entire screen, which I’d have to categorize as “not playing nicely with others”. (It does have explicit support for recording exactly where you’ve filed each book in your collection, which would be nice to see in LibraryThing). Entering a single book takes around five minutes, whereas you can whip through six to ten non-problematic books in a minute with either Delicious or LibraryThing.

You can pick up a used copy for five bucks or so, but in 2007 I’d have to say that Internet lookup of catalog information is a sine qua non.

Summary

Delicious Library is slick as hell but with some frustrating limitations. LibraryThing is extremely powerful with unparalleled lookup capabilities; some user interface work and the addition of field for shelving information would suck me in totally. The New York Time Library System has useful information in the included book, but its software is strictly outmoded.

There are several other sites and software packages out there than can fill the personal library management niche, but a quick gloss of the reviews suggest that they remain behind LT for the moment. You can view the LibraryThing test catalog I created, should you so desire. If I decide to use LT as my primary library catalog, I’d have to think long and hard before I made my listing public. Sometimes, one just wants to be alone with one’s books.

9 Comments

Dipped in Honey and Sprinkled with Sesame

Published
by
paul
on July 3, 2007
in languages and literature
. 0 Comments

I’ve been playing at translating a bit of Petronius, which is great fun—when I saw that a LatinStudy Satyricon group was starting up, I couldn’t resist. Perhaps it is somewhat beyond my nascent Latin skills, but it’s a nice change from the Vulgate. I’ve been taking a fairly loose approach, a bit looser than I’d think acceptable for a translation I was reading.

The opening fragment begins with a superb rant. Here’s a bit from my rendering of paragraph II:

Great oratory is, if I may say it, modest. It is not this swollen, disreputable blather; rather, it flows beautifully and naturally. Your flatulent spew of words is a recent migrant to Athens from Asia, a pestiferous, ill-starred exhalation upon the growing minds of our young men. Once established, it rotted our standards of eloquence, rendering us dumb.

Since then, who has risen to the level of a Thucydides or a Hyperides?

Poetry herself glistens with an unhealthy pallor. All the arts, in fact, have been weakened by a diet of this tripe, sapped of their chance to whiten into old age. Even painting has fared no better since those Egyptian poseurs discovered how to ruin that great art with their slapdashery.

There’s something reassuring about millennia-old vituperation.

(The title of this post, incidentally, comes from a line in paragraph I: “. . . sed mellitos verborum globulos, et omnia dicta factaque quasi papavere et sesamo sparsa.)

0 Comments

Don’t try to disprove Terry Pratchett

Published
by
paul
on June 26, 2007
in miscellanea
. 4 Comments
The mighty hedgehog Bestiality sure is a fun thing to do
But I have to say this as a warning to you:
With almost all animals, you can have ball
But the hedgehog can never be buggered at all.

Gytha Ogg, as readers of Pratchett’s Discworld novels will know, has a penchant for drinking songs with rather rude lyrics. The two mentioned most frequently are “A Wizard’s Staff Has a Knob on the End” (possible lyrics) and “The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered at All”.

The spines on his back are too sharp for a man
They’ll give you a pain in the worst place they can
The result I think you’ll find will appall:
The hedgehog can never be buggered at all!

Clearly, Dear Reader, you are thinking to yourself that this bit of ribald folk wisdom is naught but common sense. Alas! Witness, if you will this sobering article from Ananova (via reddit):

A Serbian man needed emergency surgery after he had sex with a hedgehog on a witchdoctor’s advice.

Zoran Nikolovic, 35, from Belgrade, says the witchdoctor told him it would cure his premature ejaculation.

But he ended up in an operating theatre after the hedgehog’s needles left his penis severely lacerated.

A hospital spokesman said: “The animal was apparently unhurt and the patient came off much worse from the encounter. We have managed to repair the damage to his penis.”

Clearly, Mr. Pratchett’s novels need to be translated into Serbian.

I find the choice of the word “witchdoctor” is also quite curious, and I admit that I was previously unaware that this particular trade is practiced on the Balkan Peninsula.

Practiced, dare I observe, with a rather direct sense of humor.

At the end of the day, when you’ve had your rough way
With all of those creatures, you’ll just have to say
“That damned Erinaceous has been my downfall–”
For the hedgehog can never be buggered at all!

(There have been far too many fan attempts to create lyrics for the Hedgehog Song.)

(Hedgehog image courtesy of stonefaction.)

4 Comments
dd