Ye olde blogg

I've been blogging for six years tomorrow.

Roger Ebert on living life

Roger Ebert continues to blog like the wind - here he discusses the art of living life as taught by Studs Terkel and others. I think Ebert on books is even better than Ebert on movies - as I commented, "The best blog posts are the ones that introduce readers to books they've never read."

It's a Poncerlanche!

Buckeye Catlicker TSO linked to a post of mine yesterday, which accounts for the increased traffic lately.

And I bet no sentence ever written til now has started with the phrase "Buckeye Catlicker TSO".

Another necessary "blog"

O dear Lord I needed this: The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks goes well with the lowercase L blog.

Two!

Looky there! I have two entries in this week's Spanning the Globe - TSO's weekly Academy Awards for (mostly) Catlicker bloggers.

I'd like to thank my wife for her understanding and patience with my strenuous blogging schedule; my kids for their many interruptions that have saved me from long, linear trains of thought; Mrs Harmon, my high-school typing teacher; and our cat Casey for peeing all over my d*mned jacket once again.

Maybe I can parlay this into a hefty raise for my per-entry rate. Pardon me a moment while I rub my hands greedily.

I like that Mickey Kaus

He must have worked in publishing a long time ago. Here's his take on TV scriptwriters taking to Youtube to get their ideas out:

It's as if the Linotype operators went on strike and decided to publish their story in four color offset!...

I knew some old Linotype operators at TSI Graphics back in the early 90s. By then there were no old "hot metal" Linotype machines left; their operators had moved on to an arcane German mainframe-based typesetting language called MOPAS. My first job at TSI was to babysit the mainframe and queue up H&J (hyphenation and justification) jobs and print runs.

Threading the ice storms

We made it back to Illinois behind one ice storm and ahead of the next.

Blogging from Indiana

ssh'ing via putty from the in-law's Windows box to my linux box at home, running emacs in a terminal. Will it all work?

Gah!

So I'm writing some Mathematica code and doing test runs that take a minute or two. In those couple of minutes I could try to think about some other set of code and be crudely interrupted before I can even finish thought one, or I can check the blogs. Blogs ahoy.

One of Joseph Haydn's Masses is chugging along in my headphones when suddenly JACKSON FARGIN' BROWN jumps out at about 100 decibels. Some idiot blogger has set up his/her blog to play Mr Brown's "Somebody's Baby" when it's loaded. Grr...

Farewell, bookpeople

John Mark Ockerbloom is closing the venerable Bookpeople mailing list in a couple of days; fortunately, some folks are starting other lists to replace it and JMO himself is now blogging at Everybody's Libraries.

Dear webmaster

If your website starts playing music when I visit it, I'll immediately close the damn thing and not visit again.

Around the horn II

• Note to self: it appears that a "mass choir" is not a choir that sings the Mass.
• The Economist goes to Dollywood. I dunno. We drove through Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, on the way back from our camping vacation back in 2002. "Living Hell" comes close to describing the traffic on the north side of the Smokies through Pigeon Forge.
• Criminy - I've been blogging for 5-1/2 years.
• JS Bach's Christmas music
  • Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248
  • the E-flat Magnificat (BWV 243a), not the more familiar Magnificat in D (BWV 243)
  • any suggestions for more?
• an interesting essay on Jefferson's Monticello by Myron Magnet in the Autumn 2007 number of City Journal. I don't know whether any conclusions are reached; I'm still working through it bit by bit. He may be leading up to "reason in government."
• the annotated American Constitution
• Joseph Story's commentary on the Constitution
• Cicero's essay on friendship - I need to find more sources for the Romans' notions of Roman virtue. Perhaps Plutarch?
• Pair programming: two guys sitting at the same computer - one driving, one thinking. Mike Hockaday and I did something like that when we were both learning TeX programming back in '92 or so - a lot of late nights with Qued/M, the TeXBook and Textures.
• Cheese and rice - that's some crappy writing: "Pullman's books drip with moral relativism, that deceptively sweet, yet fruitless nectar of the secular humanist. His portrayal of God — which is clearly intended to personify the Christian church — is that of an evil authoritarian who spitefully stifles human creativity, arbitrarily punishing mankind for very naturally and properly entertaining base impulses with unfettered license." Yeah, I'd kick Pullman given the chance, but Jeez, kid - watch your English.
• O how I hate this schmaltzy tune. This one's much better.

Around the horn

Today's blog roundup

• P-38 discovered on a Welsh beach
• the Pope's a busy guy. I often have three books in my current reading; never in my current writing.
• rude town and street names in Britain
• new blog: Old World Swine: Catholic faith, Fine Art, Hiking, Camping, Brewing, Bread Baking, Cheese Making, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and other Dead British Guys... Old Movies, Pipe Smoking
• common sense on "emergency contraception" from Bishop Vasa (Baker, Oregon) via Jeff Miller contra the bishops of Connecticut
• a Yankee in Georgia, 1864. I'll bet there's a McMansion there now.
• a strangely beautiful photo from the top of the Tennessee capitol in Nashville, 1864
• a review of the Daring Book for Girls. Our 9-year-old girl likes it.
• Texas g-school textbooks suck.

Blog nirvana

Dang! The only thing better than a mention in Spanning the Globe is a mention immediately above it :-)

And about the dearth of ye olde archaick language:

"Didst" and "Thy" are, sadly, gone from today's Mass books. Reverence is out, casualness in, both in terms of what we wear to Mass and what we sing.

You might say we exchanged Thy's for thighs.

Random meme

This turned up in a google search for Olive Garden's house wine, Principato.

1. Who is the last person you took a photograph of?

Caroline the new 3-year-old wearing a new dress during her birthday party yesterday afternoon.

2. What decade do you hold the most dear and why?

The 790s, the 1520s... wait, I should probably go with one that had electricity and such. The 2000s - the hectic decade in which our kids grew up.

3. Take the quiz: What mystical creature are you?

Oh good God.

4. What is your favorite alcoholic beverage?

Guinness, cheap wine.

5. What do you normally wear to bed?

Nothing but Brut, baby! Er, no. Flannel shirt & cut-off sweat pants.

6. What movie character do you most identify with?

Yosemite Sam.

My blog's reading level

<shrug> - hat tip: Chris Weimer at Thoughts on Antiquity (a genius-level blog :-)

Confessions of a Recovering Choir Director

Aristotle A. Esguerra has returned to the blogosphere!

Who knew?

So it turns out that James Lileks and Bill Quick are really one 1950s-obsessed interior decorator. Not that there's anything wrong with that.