Proto-Indo-European Culture

Dear Dennis: Rosemary asked me to pass on the following passage from J.P. Mallory’s “In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archeology and Myth” (which is actually a good book). “Our review of Proto-Indo-European culture omits volumes that have been written about the reconstructed vocabulary, since much falls under the category of predictable phenomena or else…

Movie Posters Redone in Lego

—Movie Posters Redone in Lego Similar:Bar Association #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 16) Rom Inspires Quark's Employe…Rewatching ST:DS9 As The Defiant return…MediaParadise Lost #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 12) Sisko Uncovers a Conspiracy on…Rewatching ST:DS9 Continuing from P…EthicsJanuary 6th … the board game? About 20 of us are here in Brooklyn to …ArtWe…

The Blogging Iceberg

Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days (almost four months).…

Rock Paper Scissors Championships

Noticed that you had written about our site, The World Rock Paper Scissors Society (www.worldrps.com) on your blog before and thought you may be interested in the upcoming 2003 Rock Paper Scissors International World Championships taking place on October 25th. Couple notes about the Championships: – We have built a new Championship specific site at…

Degree Confluence Project

What does it look like at exactly 25 degrees N, 8 degrees E? What about the other places on the globe where latitutde and longitude lines intersect? Find out at Confluences. —Degree Confluence Project (Orbitals) Link via Rosemary Frezza, who also sends this BBC article: “A Unique Picture of the World.” Similar:Microsoft Research Launches Code Hunt…

Senators butt heads over Iraq funding

—Senators butt heads over Iraq funding (Yezbick) Is there subliminal editorializing in this headline? :-) Similar:Newsworthy vs snoozeworthyJerz > Writing > Journalism JournalismOkay yes, this affirmation does matter to me and it will go into my annual review for next…Marked 832 AP English essays in a week o…AcademiaIs Superman the next Drudge? Clark Kent quits newspapers in latest issue Even…

Web Searches: The Fix Is In

Web pages soon plunged in Inktomi’s search rankings and disappeared from key sites like MSN, where Inktomi feeds its listings. After he demanded to know what happened, Spooner learned from Inktomi that his site contained editorial flaws that hurt his ranking. And he would have to become a paid-inclusion customer to learn what these flaws…

Literary Games

Literature is defamiliarizing the ordinary, making us see even the most quotidian things in a new way. And games? We might describe them in several ways, but they are certainly ritual spaces in which rules that are not the ordinary social and cultural ones apply. So perhaps the concept of the literary game — a…

On TV, Men Are the New Women

It is not surprising that the feminization of the television industry would give female characters more prominence, but it is a little disconcerting to see how men have waned in the process. Suddenly, sensitive shows are dealing with men as an oppressed minority group. Television writers who once focused on women’s dilemmas are now exploring…

Broken Biscuit Breakthrough

“We now have a greater understanding of why biscuits develop cracks shortly after being baked.” — PhD student Qasim Saleem, quoted in an article by Christine McGourty —Broken Biscuit Breakthrough (BBC) A biscuit in the UK is what Americans refer to as a “cracker”. Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary. Similar:Melissa Terras' Blog: Male, Mad and Muddleheaded:…

Stuck at the Gate

[M]ore than 1,000 fans [were] turned away from turnstiles for up to 1-1/2 hours over a bizarre ticket snafu.|The fans – many of them season ticket holders – were forced to wait on line until as late as the fourth inning to get replacement tickets after accidentally tearing their ducats out of ticket books without…

The Plame Game

In other words, a White House leaker is leaking to the Washington Post about Novak’s White House leakers, but the leaker to the Post draws short of dribbling out the identities of who leaked to Novak and whom else they tried to leak to. The Post source does, however, pass stern judgment on Novak’s leakers,…

Homework: An Easy Load?

A new Brookings Institution report debunks the popular notion that U.S. schoolchildren suffer from a growing homework load, and do not have enough time to play and just be kids. According to data analyzed by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, the great majority of students at all grade levels now spend less…

9th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition

For the last nine years, the readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction have held a yearly interactive fiction competition. For fans of the old Infocom games as well as for newcomers to the genre, the competition is a chance to enjoy some of the best short adventure games available anywhere. —9th Annual Interactive Fiction CompetitionIFcomp.org)…