Guy

Horseradish

/ Food, Garden

Father of Blogger Holding Clean Horseradish Root

Some years ago, in one of my many garden rearrangements, I invited our horseradish out of the field and back into the garden. I had space at the end of the new rhubarb bed which seemed the perfect spot. Being at the edge of the garden, it has tilled or hoed border on two sides, rhubarb on another, and a well mulched path on the inside. A great home for the enthusiastic horseradish. Though the bed was new, it was part of the old garden so the soil was good. Both the rhubarb and horseradish responded to these fresh, rich digs with such enthusiasm that I will be happy when the soil wears out a bit.

Horseradish Read More »

Cosma Shalizi’s Notebooks

/ Texts

Haley Nagy, Nagy Family Cookbook

The notebooks are intended, in the first instance, for my own use, a way of storing ideas, references, questions, puzzles, connections, possible connections, mistakes (unavoidably), things to look at or look into. My interests change; my time is limited; I know very little and have less to say about many things. For this reason, many of the notebooks are little more than placeholders. These do grow over time into more substantial documents, some of them anyway; in the meanwhile, it's not my fault if the search-engines serve them up to you.

Cosma Shalizi’s Notebooks Read More »

Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies

/ 00Uncategorized, Boats

Dyer Dhow

Without warning he would hang out a signal putting the most junior lieutenants in command of their respective ships, and then he would plunge into intricate manoeuvres calculated to turn the anxious substantive captains, looking helplessly on, grey with anxiety -- but those junior lieutenants might some day be commanding ships of the line in a battle on which the destiny of England might depend, and it was necessary to steel their nerves and accustom them to handle ships in dangerous situations. In the middle of sail drill he would signal "Flagship on fire. All boats away." He called for landing parties to storm non-existent batteries on some harmless uninhabited cay, and he inspected those landing parties once they were on shore, to the last flint in the last pistol, and treated excuses with a disregard that made men grind their teeth in exasperation. He set his captains to plan and execute cutting-out expeditions, and he commented mordantly on the arrangements for defence and the methods of attack. He paired off his ships to fight single-ship duels, sighting each other on the horizon and approaching ready to fire the vital opening broadside; he took advantage of calms to set his men to work towing and sweeping in desperate attempts to overtake the ship ahead. He worked his crews until they were ready to drop, and then he devised further tasks for them to prove to them that they had one effort left in them, so that it was doubtful whether "Old Horny" was mentioned more often with curses or with admiration.

-- C.S. Forester, Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), 157.

Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies Read More »

On Pseudonymity

/ Texts

Bad Duplicate

A decade ago, before the rise of the Web, there wasn't a lot of scholarly research on pseudonymity. Almost none. I know this because I dealt with journalistic pseudonymity in some detail in my dissertation, and when in the early 1990s I went looking for stuff on the history of pseudonymity, I really didn't find much at all.

Strange, I thought, since pseudonymy was so central to the rise of the bourgeois public sphere. I needed to understand the historical context of newspaper pseudonymity as background to some literary questions, so I went hunting and spent a godawfully long time trying to piece together some information and make painfully simple inferences from primary sources. I thought I had some publishable surmises. Then by the time the Internet became popular, every senior scholar and his sister published a book on the topic within a year. Okay, not every senior scholar. But I got scooped and I'm bitter.

Here are a few random tidbits about 18c pseudonymity, gleaned from my rusty and resentful memory. . . .

On Pseudonymity Read More »

On What Financial Bill from Russia?

/ Fish

Fish

Strangely, neither in school nor at the University I have not met Ivanov or Petrov or Sidorov. This, incidentally, I was amazed even then. Still, I went to seven schools. People with the most common surnames never done in the circle of friends at the Institute where I worked for many years, and then later, in modern times, there was no such entrepreneurs in our little area of technology. Around ran Kuznetsov, Alexandrova, Sergeeva, Vladimirova, Borisova, various others, but no Ivanov was not observed ... The turning point came in the year 2000: now on what financial bill from Russia will not look - everywhere Ivanov signs, in any newspaper in the news at least one Ivanov-Petrov-Sidorov, as noted. Where are they hiding so many years?

On What Financial Bill from Russia? Read More »

Drama Withdrawal

/ Great Britain, Theater, Weblogs

Drama Withdrawal

Some time ago Rick decided that he was suffering from drama withdrawal and went and joined Orpington Rep, one of the local amdram societies. They welcomed him with open arms and within a few months he had played a murderer and a hero. The second was in The Woman in White, for which he enlisted me as a wardrobe mistress. They're fitting in another show before he goes off to university - three comedy one-acters - and I was invited to the read-through. I pointed out that I'm a musician, not an actress. "Come on, it'll be a laugh," said Rick. So I came, and it was. And I found myself cast as a Wicked Stepmother. How did that happen?

Drama Withdrawal Read More »

The Age of Uncertainty

/ Great Britain, Texts, Weblogs

The Age of Uncertainty

To sit over a foolish or even a wise novel when the daily duties of life demand our attention is absolutely wicked. We have seen, in our own life, the mother of a family devote herself to novel reading.

The father was at sea in the merchant service. A boy, a girl, and the house demanded the wife's attention. The children were neglected, dirty, ragged, untaught, running about the roads; the house was dirty beyound description, for there was but one servant, who naturally, followed her mistress's example.

The wife could not make her income suffice her, because no one watched against waste or dishonesty in the kitchen, and her husband, when he came home from sea, was arrested for her debts.

The son, utterly ruined, ran away from school, and finally disappeared in Australia. The daughter, trained only in the unreal folly of novels, married secretly a man much below her father's station - he was also an hereditary madman!

When the mother of the boy and girl married, she had been a lovely, clever girl. But novel reading, like intoxication, bought misery on her and on two following generations.

The Age of Uncertainty Read More »

Close the Eye-Lid and Save the Eye

/ Work

Repeated experience has shown that the eye closes so quickly that where the lens is broken and pieces of glass fly from it, the eye-lid is almost invariably shut; if any cut is received it is on the outside of the lid, and superficial in character. The goggles "give" somewhat under the impact of a blow, and the fraction of a second's time thus saved is sufficient to close the eye-lid and save the eye. Where the force of a flying chip is so great as to break a heavy lens of this kind, it is obvious that the eye-ball would be shattered, even though the eye-lid were closed, if no goggle were used.

Welder

At a recent safety exposition one of the goggle manufacturers gave a graphic demonstration of the resistive power of good lenses. Repeated blows from a plunger actuated by a strong spring often failed to even crack the glass. Many workmen have been reassured in this way, where they were at first afraid to wear goggles lest they should get particles of broken glass in their eyes.

-- David Stewart Beyer, Industrial Accident Prevention (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 373-4.

Close the Eye-Lid and Save the Eye Read More »