Archive for August 2000

Some dedications.

The family’s 15th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Dedicated by permission to
RONALD W. REAGAN
President of the United States of America
and
HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, by J.D. Salinger:

If there is an amateur reader still left in the world–or anybody who just reads and runs–I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis:

TO LUCY BARFIELD

My Dear Lucy,

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be

your affectionate Godfather,
C.S. Lewis

I like looking at people’s desktops. Olivia Ball has some in this directory.

At 1:1 scale, here’s my NW “Work” desk, which here features my “kick-ass” mail reader (nmh) and some python code, my NE “Netscape” desk, and my SW “Misc1″ desk, which features jed editing the XML source of my home page. I don’t currently have anything on my SE “Misc2″ desk.

These are all in .png format and between 80k and 150k. Netscape displays .png files incorrectly; here’s my NW, NE and SW at 1:2 scale and in .jpg format. (30k-50k.)

I’m running Helix Code Gnome on RedHat 6.2. The background (which you can’t really see) is a shot of the stairs to an apartment building in Paris. I randomly scatter URLs I might want to read sometime, but not now, on the desktop. The theme is DragDome. bash is my shell and slrn is my newsreader.

A few years ago I read an article about some famous celebrity-type who had a preference for women ten thousand days old. (I wish I could remember who this was; he was a painter or poet, I think; famous, but not extremely so.) He believed that women of that age were at their mental, sexual and physical peak.

Ten thousand days is equivalent to 27 years, five months, and (about) three weeks. The word “myriad” originally referred to a quantity of ten thousand; I propose that the date on which you turn ten thousand days old be known as your Myriad. You can use this form to calculate when it falls:

^* You can edit this field too.

The biography of Maxim Jacubowski (which appears on the first page of The Mammoth Book of New Erotica–he is the editor; I did not buy the book) begins with the information that he was “born in England but educated in France.” What meaning is to be attached to the word “but”? Why was “and” not used?

Here, “but” is used as a conjunction. As a conjunction, “but” connects two contrasting phrases, and draws attention to the fact that though the latter phrase does not generally follow from the former, this is a case in which it does. For example, “My father is Anglo-Australian, but my mother is Chinese.” Did Maxim use “but” in this sense? Could one conceivably be surprised that Maxim was educated in France having been born in England? Is the relationship between the two events significant in and of itself?

The answer to these questions is no. Maxim did not use “but” in this sense. His use of “but” was not intended to inform. Instead, Maxim used it in a way that was intended to amuse. Yes, it is so: Maxim used “but” in a humourous way, to suggest that there was something significant about his studying in France even though there was not; to suggest that a French education explained some aspect of his persona even though no such explanation was required.

In Australia and New Zealand “but” is sometimes used adverbially, as the final word of a sentence. If used in this way, “but” means “though” or “however.” For example, “Burger Rings taste good but.” (This is a line from a television advertisement for the Australian snack “Burger Rings.”)

Presently, this construction is only used ironically, or as an affectation. Was it, at one time, in common use? I do not know. My memory for these things does not stretch back that far.