prasophagy
n. the eating of leeks
Resolution
Writing isn’t so bad really when you get through the worry. Forget about the worry, just press on. Don’t be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don’t strain at them. Give yourself time, you can come back and do it again in the light of what you discover about the story later on. It’s better to have pages and pages of material to work with and off and maybe find an unexpected shape in that you can then craft and put to good use, rather than one manically reworked paragraph or sentence. But writing can be good. You attack it, don’t let it attack you. You can get pleasure out of it. You can certainly do very well for yourself with it … !
— Douglas Adams, “General Note to Myself,” found among his unpublished writings after his death in 2001
A Look Back
Systems developer David Coombe has created a “street view” map of Adelaide in the 1840s by pinning digital images of Samuel Thomas Gill paintings onto historical maps of the city.
“He painted many Adelaide street scenes and there’s a lot of detail — much of it in the background,” Coombe says. “The pictures were historical and specific and accurate.”
(Thanks, Jason.)
Moving Up
In 2006, Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald traded this red paper clip for a fish-shaped pen. Then, in successive transactions, he bartered his way up to a hand-sculpted doorknob; a Coleman camp stove; a Honda generator; an empty keg with an IOU for beer; a snowmobile; a two-person trip to Yahk, British Columbia; a box truck; a recording contract; a year’s rent in Phoenix, Arizona; an afternoon with Alice Cooper; a motorized KISS snow globe; a role in the film Donna on Demand; and a two-story farmhouse in Kipling, Saskatchewan.
“A lot of people have been asking how I’ve stirred up so much publicity around the project,” he told the BBC, “and my simple answer is: ‘I have no idea.'”
Mosaic
“Abbey Amor”
A poem by Susan Thorpe:
Bells tolled,
Abbot spoke.
Wooed Abbess.
Abbey woke!
The letters in each word appear in either alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order.
(Susan Thorpe, “Alphomes,” Word Ways 28:3 [August 1995], 136-139.)
The Paradox of the Question
An angel appears to a conference of philosophers and offers to provide the truthful answer to a single question. Cannily they ask:
“What is the ordered pair whose first member is the question that would be the best one for us to ask you, and whose second member is the answer to that question?”
Truthfully the angel answers:
“It is the ordered pair whose first member is the question you just asked me, and whose second member is this answer I am giving you.”
Philosopher Ned Markosian writes, “At the time the philosophers asked [the question above], it seemed like that question was the ideal one for their peculiar situation. But as it turned out, [that question] was obviously not at all the right thing to ask. … The puzzle, then, is this: What went wrong?”
(Ned Markosian, “The Paradox of the Question,” Analysis 57:2 [1997], 95-97.)
Small Talk
“A Brief and Somewhat Ungracious Exchange Between the British Ambassador’s Wife, Who Speaks No Spanish, and the Spanish Ambassador’s Wife, Who Speaks No English, During a Courtesy Call by the Latter Upon the Former: Written on the Assumption That My Readers Know the Sound of the Spanish Word for ‘Yes'”
“T?”
“C.”
— Willard R. Espy
A Little Television
A brain-hurting illusion from Reddit’s Black Magic Fuckery:
