nickromney.com

I didn’t realise that, hidden on the map of the London Underground, are pictures of animals, but there are. Looks like you can buy an (expensive) T-shirt with them on.

yourDictionary.com has an article on 100 Most Often Mispronounced Words, which is from an American perspective, but interesting to see some of the back-formations (e.g. interpretate for interpret), metathesis (place-switching of sounds e.g. revelant for relevant)

Dunstan’s tale about being a Brit ordering food in the States made me smile a great deal. Seemingly a study was done about people believing the printed word (Holiday Inn used to have problems with guests staying past check-out time, until they put a notice on the back of the door. Stragglers staying past 12 noon were reduced to something like 2%). I’m similarly tied to the notion that a menu describes the totality of the fare on offer, but next time I order pizza in the States, I’ll consider ordering shredded salami, some mushrooms from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and some baked guava halves as well

My Kodak digital camera captures up to 2 minutes of video, with sound. However, a 2-minute clip is 30 mb in Quicktime’s .mov format. In order to edit it (either for timing or file size), I could have bought QuickTime Pro, or do what I did, which was to find some free resources on the web.

The instructions on Digital-digest.com were excellent, and I now have a 5 mb .avi file. Lovely.

A couple of months ago, I read May Week was in June by Clive James. I’ve liked his humour for years, and recall watching Saturday night Clive in the late 1980’s. He writes very polished text, and is knowingly erudite, which is perhaps why I felt a sense of unease when reading this volume of autobiography. This is a book of reflections on his time in Cambridge as a student of English Literature, and includes his reactions to many of the books he read and authors he studied. This is the type of book which would be well-suited by either more footnotes, or (preferably) a large number of hyperlinks. Rarely have I come across such blatant name-dropping, and, moreover, name-dropping which is rarely didactic, as describing one author as “reminiscent” of another, when the reader knows neither, does not move the situation on any.

I enjoy his writing, and think The Silver Castle to be a wonderful novel, far surpassing Brrm! Brrm!, which itself is excellent.

It would seem that James is a polymath, and here he recounts his time as in the Cambridge Footlights, plus his appreciation of French and Italian language, literature, culture, and tourism; films, film-making, and Cambridge cinemas; and beginnings as a writer and poet for Granta. Even with formal study of language and literature under my belt, and a fairly wide-ranging appetite for English writing, I was left fairly pummelled by all the references to other works. I wasn’t expecting May Week to be a round-up of Japanese game shows, or current satire, or travelogues (all of which he has made into programmes for British TV), but something a little more accessible. Perhaps having it as a commuting book didn’t help, reading it in staccato form, but this did allow me some time in between readings to digest some of the content.

Well-written, but terse.

During the BBC’s Big Read series, Phil Jupitus commented on the fact that Winnie the Pooh is only 15,000 words long. I found on Leon Fletcher’s page, “How Long”, that Hemingway wrote 2,000 words a day, and Robinson Jeffers just 14. I’m comforted by the knowledge that Flaubert wrote Madam Bovary in 250 words daily.

That is one of my goals for this site – to begin the discipline of writing 250 words (on any subject) per day, at least 4 days a week. I have no pretensions that any book I eventually write will have the same content as this blog, but if at least I’m in the habit of writing, then that surely will be one less hurdle on the road to publication. Am rather sobered in reading Gerry McGovern’s statistic that Printed content represents 0.003 percent of all content published annually in the world, but I am striving to equal AA Milne’s word length by the end of the year.

A couple of years ago, a friend with whom I worked recommended “Round Ireland with a Fridge” by Tony Hawks, which I read soon after, and enjoyed very much. This was the story of Tony Hawks hitchhiking round the circumference of Ireland with a kitchen appliance in order to win a bet. Seemingly the competitive streak runs strong in Tony Hawks, and in “Playing the Moldovans at Tennis”, fellow comedian Arthur Smith wagers that he can’t a) play, and b) beat the entire Moldovan football team at tennis.

Hawks’s travelogue is largely witty and sometimes poignant (particularly his increasing awareness of the things he had previously taken for granted, such as heating and lighting on demand), but I disagree with The Times that the book is “extremely funny”. I’ve read “extremely funny” books, and would probably number “Round Ireland with a Fridge” amongst them, but not this one. There were some genuinely comedic moments, particularly in the culture-clash with Iulian the translator, but if it hadn’t been for the relationship he strikes up with his host family, the book would have been reduced to mocking Eastern Europe because it’s not London.

His description of checking into an hotel in Moldova, and its state of décor was strangely reminiscent of when Richard, Andrew and I checked into one in neighbouring Romania. They didn’t seem at all troubled by our request for a room with three single beds (which surprisingly they had), but if we’d asked for a bathroom painted a colour other than Tartrazine orange, they would have struggled.

Annoyingly for a book costing £7.99, (or £6.39 on amazon), proof-reading seems to be sorely neglected in the second half of the manuscript. Some of Hawks’s most amusing observations are on his difficulties on communicating with the Moldovans, and the peculiarities of the Romanian language course he purchased (which had space for various circus-related jobs, but not for basic medical ailments). Often he resorts to French in order to communicate at all, so it was annoying to see typographical errors in English, and language errors in French (jeus rather than jeux for football matches).

Still, I was willing to forgive a few problematic pages for a book which has helped me locate Moldova (and Transnistria) on a map, and also bring back memories of a week’s holiday in Romania in 1998.

Read Eric Meyer’s roundup on SXSW 2004, and find that I too am a person mentioned in his SXSQ04i Wrap-Up: in that I hadn’t come across bookmarklets / favelets. Am pleased to say that I’ve now added in a few of Squarefree’s bookmarklets and Tantek’s favelets, and they’re becoming very useful.

I’ve been a fan of the English Standard Version ever since I bought one in 2002, shortly after hearing it highly recommended at the London Men’s Convention (this year again at the Albert Hall 22 May; the pilot of the Northern Men’s Convention is in Manchester on 15th May).

I grew up on the Good News version, also known as the TEV (Today’s English Version), and then switched to the NIV (New International Version) at around 16. It served me well, especially the Study Bible version, with a monster concordance and good footnotes, but I was increasingly having conversations about some of the mis-renderings. (No longer the “nearly infallible version” I often heard it dubbed as a student).

Alan Jacobs (Professor of English at Wheaton College) has written a very interesting essay on the process of the translation, and some of the pitfalls of previous versions. I enjoyed his comment that the ESV is “the best thing to come out of a committee meeting in quite a while”.

There’s a comprehensive suite of search options available here

Phew! That’s a relief. I read Eric Meyer’s thoughts on Textual Healing, in which he was described as a grammar “Fuhrer” (sic). So, the gauntlet was thrown down, the stakes were high, and I headed over to Quizilla’s grammar quiz.

Am relieved to say that the verdict on my language skills was also:

You are the grammar Fuhrer. All bow to your authority. You will crush all the inferior people under the soles of your jackboots, and any who question your motives will be eliminated. Your punishment is being the bane of every other person’s existence, because you’re constantly contradicting stupidity. Everyone will be gunning for you. Your dreams of a master race of spellers and grammarians frighten the masses. You must always watch your back. If only your power could be used for good instead of evil.

Am now pondering whether to take issue with Quizilla that “Fuhrer” is diacritically impoverished (i.e. should be Führer). Reminds me of a few lines of dialogue recounted to me by my friend Matt Bradburn in which a man was accused of “pedanticism”. His only reponse to this was to say in hushed tones, “pedantry”. My thoughts exactly.

A sidebar to this article is when posting this, the accented “u” (which on my Windows keyboard is achievable through Alt+129) didn’t render as I would have wished (presumably utf-8 encoding is different), so off I went on a hunt for HTML equivalent characters, and found a very useful resource at starr.net. It turns out that the HTML markup is ü i.e. “u umlaut”, which brings me on to another diatribe from my soapbox.

umlaut is the German word for the English diaeresis i.e. a diacritic (accent) of two dots over a printed character. Dictionary.com’s definition is quite helpful. I can see that it is more often used in German that English, but not exclusively (e.g. the examples given in the above definition: Brontë and naïve). &udia; anyone?

In any case, the quiz is quite illustrative.