Upcoming trip to Africa was to include South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe. …
The organizers just called to say (surprise!) the Zimbabwe leg has been canceled. We’ll be going to Zambia instead. Organizers will pay for all Zambian visas &c. The visas we had for Zimbabwe won’t be needed after all.
Brilliant app.
The Corpus of American English (not to be confused with the American National Corpus) is the first large corpus of contemporary American English. It is freely available online, and it is related to other large corpora that we have created.
The corpus contains more than 360 million words of text, including 20 million words each year from 1990-2007, and it is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts (more information). The corpus will also be updated at least twice each year from this point on, and will therefore serve as a unique record of linguistic changes in American English.
The interface allows you to search for exact words or phrases, wildcards, lemmas, part of speech, or any combinations of these. You can search for surrounding words (collocates) within a ten-word window (e.g. all nouns somewhere near chain, all adjectives near woman, or all verbs near key).
The corpus also allows you to easily limit searches by frequency and compare the frequency of words, phrases, and grammatical constructions, in at least two main ways:
* By genre: comparisons between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic, or even between sub-genres (or domains), such as movie scripts, sports magazines, newspaper editorial, or scientific journals
* Over time: compare different years from 1990 to the present time
You can also easily carry out semantically-based queries of the corpus. For example, you can contrast and compare the collocates of two related words (little/small, democrats/republicans, men/women), to determine the difference in meaning or use between these words. You can find the frequency and distribution of synonyms for nearly 60,000 words and also compare their frequency in different registers, and also use these word lists as part of other queries. Finally, you can easily create your own lists of semantically-related words, and then use them directly as part of the query.
Organizing the Attic – Week Four wherein our intrepid columnist attacks the books in the attic.
Well, numero uno. Books in the attic are never a good idea as Carter Anne Seddon Kinsolving Brown found out decades ago. (She’d put her library at the top of her old house and found that the top was sinking down and the walls were bulging out. … She had to take all the books out of the upstairs library and rehab the house and then reorganize the library somewhere other than the top floor. …)
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Update: ASKBrown bio. The next mail will bring an intriguing query that puts you on your mettle. Or the parlour-maid may come up some morning and announce that your husband’s 18th century dwelling is beginning to buckle under the weight of your books. This actually happened to us last Holy Week [1967], whereupon the Blessed Season was passed in moving 5 tons of books out of the house to the stacks at Brown University. It was a traumatic experience, believe me, with architects clambering about measuring bulges, and carpenters boring holes in the walls from cellar to garret, while Mama tearfully or cheerfully went about designating the books she consulted the least, and movers packed cartons it might well have been termed the Second Battle of the Bulge.
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I read the Week Four column and thought, oh, poor baby:
Ever since then, I have been skittish about the size of our book collection, which peaked at about 600 when we moved into our house in the District seven years ago.
So after going through the books in the attic, our intrepid columnist and her husband wound up donating 25 hardcover and 42 paperback books to their local branch library. 10% of the collection? No big wow there.
The hints from the professional organizer the columnist has on tap?
First, check the condition of the book. “Are the pages so brittle and yellow that you’re never going to read them?” If so, she says, donate. And second, “be realistic about the format you like to read them in.” Most people never re-read paperbacks they’ve kept for a while, especially the smaller ones, she says.
Would she faint if she saw what I need to get a handle on?
LAME!”
Well, you’re right.
(Or as Heather said last month, “you don’t use facebook”)
Well. No. Not much. Guilty as charged.
I’m doing the Facebook thing because the younger nib pushed and Sue Hough pushed and others, well, you know who you are.
Facebook’d I now be.
But, all the poking and gifting and wall writing and all … Well. I’m a geezer here, folks. I have a hard enough time keeping up with blogs and newsgroups and e-mail.
Bear with me.
I did manage to write on Hana’s wall tonight. (And send Hana and Aarti friends’ requests today … um. yesterday.)
Do you know how many Aarti Singhs there are on Facebook? Aarti had said, “Sign up!” eons ago. Today I finally had the time to go through all the Aarti Singhs on Facebook and find those that were or might be relatively local and then go through all *their* friends lists until I found one who had friends I recognized (Hi, Hana!) in her friends list.
Bingo.
Hillsdale College – William F. Buckley: “This website contains the complete writings of William F. Buckley, Jr. Transcripts from his long-running TV show, Firing Line are available at the Hoover Institution.”
MOLESKINE — DETOUR: SPECIAL EXHIBITION OF ARTISTS’ MOLESKINE NOTEBOOKS
Intriguing what folks have done with their Moleskine notebooks.
Eric Hoffer used Boorum & Pease Memo Books, 4 1/2 x 7 1/4, 98 pages. There are 131 notebooks in the archives, dating from 1949-1977. Hoffer used his notebooks as places to stash his thoughts, which he would later retrieve and craft into his published writings. In all, the Hoover Institute, which holds the Hoffer archives, has seventy-five feet of Hoffer work.
Paul Madonna uses yet another type of small notebook, sketchbook. Neither Moleskine nor B&P, I don’t think.
I am an obsessive note-taker, carrying a book on me at all times. I have a theory that we have only so much space available in our brains to remember thoughts. A small percentage of ideas are realized, and if we waste energy holding onto what may later turn out to be a trite idea, we may have missed or forgotten the one of gold. he says.
He revisits his notebooks frequently looking for ideas for his work. In his studio, he has a shelf holding all his notebooks since he began his journey. All his drawings … he can go back and find something he drew three years ago and remember the angle of a gable or the detail on a portico. Or he can go back to when he first started drawing faces and see how he’s changed. He can find snippets of conversation he’s overheard or ideas of something to draw. I look at his notebooks and think, wow. This guy is really focussed on what he does. This guy has an archive of thoughts and sketches that will feed his muse for a long long time to come.
I always intend to keep a notebook that captures it all. I have a few Moleskine notebooks that I’ve bought (because I like blank, bound books) and which the younger nib has given me (accompanied by “Write, Mom!” sorts of notes). I usually wind up, though, with scatterings and scraps of paper with dates and notes and words I need to look up, meanings known but not really, allusions known but not really, quotes that appeal. … The scraps of paper are often the tab end of a full-page ad on non-magazine stock. Know what I mean? You tear out the ad and there, at the back end of the magazine, is a strip of paper stock about 3″ wide and the height of the magazine.
I sorted and stacked Monday for the FirstMonday meeting at my place that night. I wound up with a large envelope (picked out of the daily mail, ‘natch) filled with these scraps of paper. (And that’s just the bits and pieces lying around uncaged.) Later I’ll re-copy them onto blank notebook pages but … where’s the retrieval mechanism except for thumbing through old notebooks?
When world famous author Sal dies, there will be some archive of what made her tick besides the unreachable archives of what she wrote on a computer and posted to the Web lo’ these many years past. There will be dozens of half-used notebooks where Sal started thinking about keeping track of her thoughts and where she was and where she thought she was going and then …
Do you use a notebook to stash and store anything? Pictures? Notes? Thoughts? Do you draw in your notebook? Have a grid that you adhere to? Add color. Write lies?
Found a 9×14″ (or whatever) envelope in today’s mail from Pacific Union/GMAC Real Estate, from our buddies Steve (Steven Mavromihalis) and John (John Fitzgerald). Cover letter is signed (really) with first names only.
Steve and John are shopping the sixth floor of the C. Alfred Meussdorffer-designed 1800 Gough. (1800 Gough units are full-floor.)
Steve and John sent us an eight-page full-color brochure with drop-caps and lovely copywriting, describing the Fujitso Plasma HDTV, the Yamaha MusicCast audio system, the ceiling mounted speakers, the kitchen, the bedrooms, the “welcome and dramatic sense of arrival … opens to a secure elevator vestibule finished in exquisite black lacquer wood and featuring a unique silver leaf ceiling,” “The residence becomes simply magical as dusk falls and the golden dome of City Hall becomes the centerpiece, glowing amongst the backdrop of San Francisco.”
For those reading from afar, this is code-speak that 1800 Gough is on the southern slope of Pacific Heights, facing the City and not the Bay (or the Golden Gate Bridge, or Alcatraz, or … well, you get the idea.)
Nowhere in the brochure is the price mentioned because, well, because prices have been known to change and who knows how big a print-run Steve and John had for the brochure.
“Dramatic City skyline views, peering towards Russian Hill and beyond to the Transamerica Tower and the Oakland Hills.
The range is a six burner Thermador (meaning “gas,” I assume. I’d never buy this place without gas cooking in place).
I looked at all the pics. Found one I thought Ms. Paula would rilly like. Checked out the price.
$3m.
Um. No.
And, alas, the pic I thought Ms. Paula would really like isn’t on the Web site. The pic was of the walk-in closet for the master bedroom (which has TWO bathrooms so you don’t have to squabble over who gets the sink first when you’re brushing your teeth before beddie-bye).
The walk-in closet shoe shelving built-ins appear to carry six-plus pairs per shelf. Twelve shelves showing in the pics. WE’RE TALKING ROOM FOR SEVENTY-TWO-PLUS PAIRS OF SHOES.
Oh. My. [fanning self]
(How did our name get on Steve and John’s list of potential buyers?)
10 Unexpected Costs of Owning Things | almostfearless.com
I know this is true.
The hundreds of magazines I recycled last weekend? I know I probably would’ve never found time to read them. I know more come in every day. I know I don’t need all the books I have. How often do I listen to a given CD?
Do I need my stuff?
But the thought of giving up my stuff gives me the shivers.
Bit by slowly bit … maybe.
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