My dogs are taking turns keeping me up at night. If I ignore them, they'll use the house as an indoor toilet. So I get up and hope it's not to late. Or I get out the carpet cleaning machine-o-rama.
1) Wife is traveling
2) Indoor dogs as pets
3) Indoor carpet cleaning
4) Vet visit may be in order
5) Thinking of buying pet health insurance
6) I'd like to dig up the guy who invented the alarm clock and kill him
Take your damned pick.
__________________
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.
Every time I see that Dyson Sphere thread in Sciences I'm reminded about how much I need a new vacuum cleaner for the house and don't want to pay that kind of money (but still kind of want a Dyson)
Academics who misuse technical terms in ways that eliminate any possibility of making sense of the passage are on my shit list today.
A book group I participate in is going to be reading The Name of the Rose for one of its May selections (we have two each month). That was my suggestion to mark Eco's passing and it got selected, so I figured I might bring in some other material to elucidate it. I have a book called The Key to the Name of the Rose, which is very useful in translating all the non-English passages as well as pointing out Eco's medieval sources, but I also borrowed a book of essays called Naming the Rose: Essays on Eco's 'The Name of the Rose' by M. Thomas Inge (ed). I read the general introduction and Eco's own essay response to the volume, then skipped to the "Postscript", which addressed the subject of why the book became a bestseller. In that section, I found the following passage:
Quote:
Moreover, Eco may not have taken three other factors sufficiently into account: (1) the conventional pattern of the detective-story plot, which climaxes with the anastrophe and the epiphany of the sleuth-hero and which, because it is conventional, a source of expectations, readers are likely to impose on a novel's resolution....
The emphasized word immediately threw me because that is not what "anastrophe" means. Anastrophe is a term in rhetoric referring to the inversion of the usual order of words or clauses in a sentence, and in no way could I make that definition apply to the conclusion of the standard detective story or the sleuth in it. It bugged me because the essay as a whole is written in a straightforward style. If it had been nonstop academic obscurantism, I wouldn't have tried to solve the enigma of this misused word for so long, but would have just passed it by. Instead, I spent three wasted minutes just trying to puzzle out what in the hell the author could be talking about.
Here's hoping the rest of the book is better.
By pure coincidence, I also found another book that may be relevant to The Name of the Rose. I've long wanted to read the fin de siècle decadent writer Marcel Schwob's Imaginary Lives, but all the English editions were long out of print and unattainable except at extortionate prices. But just a few days ago, I found out that there's a $5.49 Kindle edition available. And among the 22 fictitious biographies of figures from both history and legend, guess who was included? Fra Dolcino!
The whole list of featured persons is, in order, Empedocles, Herostratus, Crates of Thebes, Septima, Lucretius, Clodia Metelli, Petronius, Sufrah (a sorcerer from the story of Aladdin), Fra Dolcino, Cecco Angliolieri, Paolo Uccello, Nicolas Loyseleur, Katherine the Lacemaker, Alain the Gentle, Gabriel Spenser, Pocahontas, Cyril Tourneur, William Phips, William Kidd, Walter Kennedy, Stede Bonnet, and Burke and Hare.
Last edited by Nullifidian; 04-24-2016 at 10:24 PM.
There's too much good content on the Netflix! That is a yuge, USA Texas-sized first world ultra problem! Gah, at least I'm not in grad school. I'd be fucked.
Instead I'm catching up on all the great TV I missed I'm grad school.
It really just adds insult to injury how of all the idiots who think my email address is theirs, none of them do anything even remotely interesting. It's all just the dullest, most generic shit ever.
They're signing up for emails from fucking Target and Payless Shoes and Forever 21 and Home Goods and shit. Some kind of 'beach body' thing. The teenager is all about One Direction. Whoever signed up with Pandora just had Adele on there. I mean, it's not even the sorts of things I would have imagined you'd have to ask for or seek out.
Maybe it's just that stupid people who don't know their own email addresses are also really boring or something, but you'd think there'd be something in there that's not just top-level generic consumer profile crap. It's not just that there's never anything weird-weird, or just that they're signing up for those things. There's never even anything that's even remotely non-standard. All they ever sign up for is dull and generic. This is what people mean when they call people 'basic bitches,' I guess.
BTW, a fun fact is that Glamour magazine does not do email verification, they spam every single day, and they won't unsubscribe you. If you know any basic bitches, they'd probably like it if you did that to them.
It really just adds insult to injury how of all the idiots who think my email address is theirs, none of them do anything even remotely interesting. It's all just the dullest, most generic shit ever.
They're signing up for emails from fucking Target and Payless Shoes and Forever 21 and Home Goods and shit. Some kind of 'beach body' thing. The teenager is all about One Direction. Whoever signed up with Pandora just had Adele on there. I mean, it's not even the sorts of things I would have imagined you'd have to ask for or seek out.
Maybe it's just that stupid people who don't know their own email addresses are also really boring or something, but you'd think there'd be something in there that's not just top-level generic consumer profile crap. It's not just that there's never anything weird-weird, or just that they're signing up for those things. There's never even anything that's even remotely non-standard. All they ever sign up for is dull and generic. This is what people mean when they call people 'basic bitches,' I guess.
They've started making cute hedgehog prints in flannel, but I already have two flannel quilts and can't justify making myself a third.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
As a pre-menopausal woman, just looking at that picture makes me too hot. There's no way I would have anything warm that can't be easily thrown off in case of hot flashes.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
My home broadband is down! I'm having to use mobile data through my phone's hotspot feature!
Also, the ISP's status page says
Quote:
We know of 1 issue in your area
You might find that your Virgin TV, TiVo® service and Virgin Broadband is not working at the moment.
Our engineer is working to fix the problem.
We know of 1 issue in your area
You might find that your Virgin TV, TiVo® service and Virgin Broadband is not working at the moment.
Our engineer is working to fix the problem.
Fix estimate
01 July 16:00
Update:
Quote:
Broadband
We know of 3 issues in your area
You might find that your Virgin TV, TiVo® service and Virgin Broadband is not working at the moment.
Our engineer is working to fix the problem.
Reference no: F004567737
Fix estimate
01 July 23:00
You might find that you do not have any Virgin Broadband, Virgin TV, TiVo® or Virgin Phone service at the moment. We have identified the problem and an engineer is on their way.
Reference no: F004567747
Fix estimate
01 July 23:00
You might have trouble signing into My Virgin Media at the moment.
We have identified the problem and an engineer is on their way.
Reference no: F004569618
Fix estimate
02 July 00:10
TV
We know of 2 issues in your area
You might find that your Virgin TV, TiVo® service and Virgin Broadband is not working at the moment.
Our engineer is working to fix the problem.
Reference no: F004567737
Fix estimate
01 July 23:00
You might find that you do not have any Virgin Broadband, Virgin TV, TiVo® or Virgin Phone service at the moment.
We have identified the problem and an engineer is on their way.
Reference no: F004567747
Fix estimate
01 July 23:00
Phone
We know of 1 issue in your area
You might find that you do not have any Virgin Broadband, Virgin TV, TiVo® or Virgin Phone service at the moment.
We have identified the problem and an engineer is on their way.
Reference no: F004567747
The engineer is clearly rushed off his foot.
Also, the status page (My Virgin Media) where I'm getting this is clearly overloaded - see red highlighted line