April 6, 2024
Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas
Gary Shteyngart on assignment from The Atlantic engages in a supposedly fun thing that he'll never do again, cruising from Florida to St. Kitts and CocoCay on board Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas. [more inside]
How are crayons made?
Cassowaries under threat from feral pigs
Australia has a feral pig problem and it is affecting the habitat of the cassowary (three minute video from BBC Earth.) There are only 2000 cassowaries left in Australia. There are 24 million feral pigs in Australia - for context, Australia only has 27.1 million people. Feral pigs compete with cassowaries for food. Feral pigs also eat cassowary eggs and cassowary chicks. Over 100 plant species depend on the cassowary to spread their seeds - if cassowaries disappear, it is disastrous for the rainforest and the other animals who rely on the rainforest.
What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?
Orville Peck & Willie Nelson - Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond Of Each Other (slyt) [more inside]
"No meaning, no magic, just the work of it: the work of art"
Adam Moss (Vulture, 04/04/2024), "How'd You Make That? Three masterpieces from glimmer through struggle to breakthrough": "So I began talking to creators ... here are three of those conversations with the artists Cheryl Pope and Kara Walker and the poet Louise Glück." Of related interest: Dungeons & Dragons (early draft; see the upcoming book). A first draft of Finnegans Wake. The first page of 1984. Story Synopsis and Rough Draft [PDF] for Star Wars. The Creative Process: A Symposium. For checkout, The Making of The Pré. Plus "Work in Progress: Notes, Drafts, Revision, Publication," "... Check Out These Drafts From Famous Authors," "Surprising secrets of writers' first book drafts," and "First drafts of famous novels."
Gonna get downright MetaFiltered tonight
The English language is famous for its large number of drunkonyms, i.e. words that can be used to refer to the state of drunkenness – from blind and hammered to pissed, smashed and wasted. Various lists of words have been compiled in the past (e.g. Levine 1981). However, most of the terms seem to be relatively infrequent, and they also appear to fall out of use relatively quickly. In view of Michael McIntyre’s (2009) claim that it is possible to use any word to mean ‘drunk’ in English, this contribution therefore approaches the issue from a constructionist perspective. In a corpus-based study, we tested whether it is possible to model the expression of drunkenness in English as a more or less schematic (set of) construction(s). Our study shows that while corpus evidence for truly creative uses is scarce, we can nonetheless identify constructional and collostructional properties shared by certain patterns that are used to express drunkenness in English. For instance, the pattern be/get + ADV + drunkonym is strongly associated with premodifying (and often strongly intensifying) adverbs such as completely, totally and absolutely. A manual analysis of a large wordlist of English drunkonyms reveals further interesting patterns that can be modelled constructionally.“I’m gonna get totally and utterly X-ed.” Constructing drunkenness, a spirited academic paper from the Yearbook of the GCLA [more inside]
ὀφειλήματα are not “transgressions” but “debts”
One does not need to be a scholar of late antiquity to notice how often Jesus speaks of trials, of officers dragging the insolvent to jail. The Lord's Prayer, quite explicitly, requests — in order — adequate nourishment, debt relief, avoidance of arraignment before the courts, and rescue from the depredations of powerful but unprincipled men. [Note: The first 3 paragraphs are rather opaque and ornate but from the 4th paragraph, which begins "Christians are quite accustomed to thinking of Christianity as a fairly commonsensical creed," biblical scholar David Bentley Hart really starts cooking, albeit with academic vocabulary.] [more inside]
Flat oysters growing in Botany Bay again after more than 100 years
Flat oysters growing in Botany Bay after more than a century of local extinction.
Australian flat oysters went extinct in Botany Bay during the late 1800s. A conservation project has been working to bring them back.
Hierarchies of Fountain Pen Friendly Paper
“So as a baseline, what needs to happen before I will publicly recommend something as “fountain pen friendly paper”? My standard is fairly simple: No bleed-through or feathering with any fountain pen nib that can be reasonably used for everyday writing. (Because I mainly use my paper for drafting and notetaking, as opposed to drawing, wet ink samples, or flex-nib calligraphy, my standards may be more lenient than some.)” [more inside]
Many young people today see the game as the preserve of older people
Previously played by children, Japan’s adult population first went ballistic for pachinko after the Second World War, when the first commercial pachinko parlor opened in Nagoya. Popularity peaked during the 1990s, with an estimated 30 million people in approximately 18,244 pachinko parlors across the country. Today, however, according to the National Police Agency, the number of pachinko parlors has fallen to 7,655 — a 9.3% decline from the previous year. from Is Japan’s Pachinko Industry in Decline? [Tokyo Weekender] [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »