Line from an online apartment listing: "These apartments are diamonds in a ruff!" Which is kind of a wonderful image. I bet you’d need a lot of starch in your ruff to get the diamonds to stay in there… (What’s an eggcorn? Here’s a definition.)
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Amanda
Hello? Anyone out there? It’s been awfully quiet around here of late. Though if my own blogger’s block is any indication, this is the time of year for minimal posting, minimal commenting, and vacations. In assorted Bullets of Random Crap news: Up next on my reading list: Alison Bechdel‘s new graphic novel Fun Home (which […]
Yesterday I returned from a whirlwind out-of-town trip for a dinner with my friend R. and our mutual friend W., a reunion of sorts: it was the first time in nearly a decade that we’d all seen each other at once. There was much catching-up and exclamations of "You look exactly the same!" and "I […]
This passage on the turning of the seasons and the progress of time from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been on my mind of late. (Someone in my corner of the blogosphere posted it a while back, but I can’t remember who.) It’s quite long, so I’m ellipsizing a bit: A year soon […]
Earlier today I was trying to remember the source of a 16th-century engraving of a reading machine — a giant wheel that could hold multiple books at once and allow a reader to rotate from one book to another. I’d seen it in multiple places (reproduced in one of the essays in The Renaissance Computer, […]
And while I’m on the subject of food: a friend pointed out Historic Food, a fascinating site about British cooking from the late Middle Ages to the Victorian era. The author gives courses on historically accurate cookery; the site has pictures of forgotten, astonishing culinary tools (my current favorite is the confectioner’s mould to make […]
Pan-Mediterranean Chickpea Stew, or, Why Improvisational Cooking Is the Best Drain: one 19-oz. can of chickpeas. Open: one carton Pomì chopped tomatoes. Chop finely: a couple of cloves of garlic (to taste). On one burner, start some rice cooking. On another burner, heat a splosh of olive oil in a pot. Add chopped garlic and […]
In one of the stairways leading up to the William Rainey Harper Library at the University of Chicago, there is a niche that holds an immense bronze bust of Walt Whitman, some three or four feet high. When I was an undergraduate there, I used to go past the bust almost daily. I found it […]
(Here follows some noodling that I might turn into something longer and more polished. It’s also tangentially related to my “Why research is hard” series of posts.) Recently the Internet Scout Report featured Cornell University’s online guide to birds. Curious about an unfamiliar bird I’d spotted, I figured I’d try a sample search. I was hoping to […]
My springtime cold lingered for a week, and I’m still clearing my throat at intervals. So I’ve been cheering myself up by reading some of Russell Edson‘s prose poems. Here are two: The Fall There was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out saying to his parents that he was […]