Plastic Words

2006-11-15T17:07:00.000-05:00

Standby for answers to problems

2006-11-15T17:05:00.000-05:00

Standby for answers to worksheet problems

2006-11-15T17:04:00.001-05:00

Stand by for answers to worksheet problems

2006-11-15T17:04:00.000-05:00

Stand by for answers to problem worksheets

2006-11-15T16:58:00.000-05:00

Stand by for answers to Problem worksheets 1-3.

2004-06-21T12:15:00.000-04:00

Barbecue If only the subject line were anti-spam-bot google-bait... So, I've been watching the collected Alton Bruininiana that the folks over at digital distractions have archived, and I came across, in an episode entitled "Q", a plan for constructing a home smoker out of two unglazed terracotta flower pots, a hotplate, and a replacement grill. Said contraption was constructed for

2003-11-10T19:46:00.000-05:00

Been awhile, folks. As if there's an audience now - the accumulated linkage surplus has more than been amortised by the year or so of steady disinterest on my part.I'm getting married, buying a car, buying an apartment, and teaching algebra to one hundred and three New York teens in a Chelsea high school. A depiction of the trivium and quadrivium in magnificient stained-glass panels frames the

2003-03-27T19:36:00.000-05:00

One month. All I can think of is stock and broth.A correspondent writes: I've got a bunch of bones and fat in the freezer because I thought I'd try boiling them to make broth. Any tips? One thing I'm wondering about is the ratio of bones to water.Roast dem bones till they are brown, with the fat rendered out and any remaining adhering tissue is thoroughly roasted (***not*** blackened). We

2003-02-17T11:18:00.000-05:00

And, yes, I'm transiting the old "Plastic Words" postings off the page. They're from a time gone by. When intemperate oral froth began a warm, tight feeling 'twixt beater and breast, An age When monkeys and pigs by force of anger did fly And rest In roosts of plush velour, and seat-back trays bore the burden of free booze On domestic flights. Orange was a drink, and Homeland was Heimat

2003-02-17T10:49:00.000-05:00

The question of curriculum: as I see it, I am a cook, and my job is to prepare a feast from which none go home hungry out of either revulsion, boredom, or want.So, I punch things up. I''m turning my classroom into a college seminar. Writing and reading and etymology, oh my.

2003-02-17T10:43:00.000-05:00

Ersatz epithets - suitably censored and diligently prepared for use in the classroom: holy bajoly munking dunkits crazy as a Bactrian Camel "Stiff knees, slack jaw. Please reverse." "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote" "You Posadist left-deviationist!" "Two mountains shall never meet, Miss Pena." "Thank you, Leo!" "Cheerily Hittite!"

2003-02-17T10:38:00.000-05:00

"Well, Mr. Greenbaum, your difficulties are primarily in the realm of curriculum - you must realize that students today simply are not on the same level as you were when you attended school."

2002-09-06T12:36:00.000-04:00

L'Shanah Tovah!

2002-08-21T11:46:00.000-04:00

Actually, over the last couple of months, I've realized how forced and inane my intermittent contributions to this web-log have been. Time for an indefinite hiatus. This link will remain active, but I can't predict when I will start posting to this log again. Spending more time thinking up witty graphic design for the banner than on the posting should have clued me in months ago. Time to go

2002-08-07T09:34:00.000-04:00

Pithy, like lab-slaughtered rats' skullsI am horribly dismayed.Let me restate that. That disgusts me. That the bureaucratic application of a label to a human being and legal citizen of the United States of America - an arbitrary marker of "enemy combatant" - is sufficient to convert a legal person into rightless chattel for processing in an administrative-bureaucratic machine, is an outrage and

2002-07-24T08:10:00.000-04:00

And eighteen days againLittle ol' Dovidl, looking for thing to make him go and post to his weblog, yep, dot's me. Yessirree. I say nothing about the situation in Israel, nor will I say anything about the current meltdown in the world's financial markets (except to say that the dollar bet that I had with my friend Howard from way back in the spring of '99 - looks I will be winning that bet - and

2002-07-06T12:50:00.000-04:00

Yeah, it's been a monthlet me tide you over with a little story...DodgeballImagine an two-story octogonal school, laid out around a gymnasium/auditorium. Around the wall-height rim of octogonal gym, a balconied walkway rings the inside of the second story. Off this walkway are the doors to twelve classrooms and two bathrooms. At ground level, the asbestos-tiled concrete pavement is bounded by

2002-06-06T19:18:00.000-04:00

Top hats and tin badgesIf this evening's news reports are right, the President is about to call for a very large reorganization of government. In the newest scheme, disparate agencies - Lawrence Livermore Labs, the Coast Guard, FEMA, the Secret Service, INF, Border Service, et cetera - are going to ripped from their cabinet departments of origin, and placed under the direction of a new

2002-06-01T14:26:00.000-04:00

Spiderman! The operative phrase would be a flabbergasted "Wow!"

2002-05-22T16:50:00.000-04:00

I've been really busy. I hope the Indian subcontinent doesn't go up in a gout of nuclear flame. More tonight.

2002-05-20T22:38:00.000-04:00

Stephen Jay Gould - 1942-2002 - R.I.P.Wow. I'd say that Orrin Judd has no sense of tact, but I believe that it would redundant - a lesser included charge under the felonyheading of Obnoxious Lunatic Moron.

2002-05-17T15:48:00.000-04:00

The Seven AM Cultural Revolution of dissipated exhaustion after the 3 am violent overthrow of the consciousnessI am dying here. Eighty thousand degrees and enough humidity to chafe a camel. How much is the Ocean View worth again?Update: worth every penny. On the mainland, they're starch-steam pressing the trees. Armpit-Sweatman, the Funk Fairy, and Heatstinkboy bestow their aesthetic and

2002-05-16T17:04:00.000-04:00

Autophagous thanateidololatriaIt's a good phrase. Pompous. Rich in authority - it suggests deep wisdom, 'cuz its cobbled together from Greek roots. It means 'self-consuming death worship".

2002-05-16T13:33:00.000-04:00

Now is the Later, and Leon Wieseltier has done the more for meSince the Netanya suicide bombing on the night of the first Pesach Seder, I and a lot of other American Jews contracted a fit of the vapors. Mr. Wieseltier, in a piece on the New Republic website, expresses perfectly - excellently pitched - a critique of the self-indulgent qualities of the public panic:The savagery of the

2002-05-09T11:45:00.000-04:00

I'm a big horned toad, and blood's jes' shootin' from my eye!More on this piece by Ron Rosenbaum later.

2002-05-09T00:30:00.000-04:00

God is dead, and boy is he pissedCrub. So, I had this spectacularly good day, all chock full of physical exercise, personal creativity, and concrete accomplishment, and just when I was about to sacrifice in thangsgiving a pair of rock doves (they're nesting on the porch lamp and crapping on the welcome mat - I must remove their nest and shoo them off) Avram Grumer posted this interesting entry

2002-05-05T22:08:00.000-04:00

Crap. It was too good to be true.I was planning to post an essay on food and familiarity here - which will come later, and it will be full of cholent-y goodness. I was also going to hold to a self-imposed ban on discussion of the situation in .. . yeah. Well.So one of the things that surprised me in the aftermath to the kamikaze hijackings was the emergence of Chris Hitchens as someone whose

2002-04-29T04:19:00.000-04:00

Should I blame it on irritable indigestion?This blogging thing is hard. They expect you to be reasoned and responsible and logical and everything here. Rightfully, Patrick Nielsen Hayden brings me up short.That seems like a tremendous amount to dump on Ginger Stampley's head... I don't see where you get off accusing Ginger of any kind of "high horse." Nor am I clear on what you mean to imply

2002-04-28T00:37:00.000-04:00

Why Ginger Stampley and the host of other liberal well-meaning commentators and observers on the Middle Eastern conflict completely miss the point when they wield their friendly, objective reasonableness..I posted this to rec.arts.sf.fandom at the end of October. It states my objection to Ginger Stampley's viewpoint.... Some quotes:One of the problems that must be addressed in the comflict is

2002-04-24T10:44:00.000-04:00

Michael MorgensternFascinating graphic and conceptual artist, doing integrative composition and collage in Photoshop. He is very good, having done illustrations for books, the New Yorker, et cetera.Also a gentleman and an exhausted new parent. His wife is from my grandmother's hometown. Buy his stuff. Buy.

2002-04-23T16:58:00.000-04:00

Twelve days a'countin'I don't think I ought to comment on the news story about the advice the Berlin police administration gave to Jews considering a stroll through the Paris on the Spree. You know, the one where they say that outward signifiers of Jewish faith, like yarmulkes, striemels, long black gabardine coats, beards, et cetera, are very certainly poor fashion sense, and possibly

2002-04-11T18:57:00.000-04:00

A placeholder for bemused ragecomments from the "warblogger watch?"Inquiry? I am a warblogger? I dislike the term. A lot, actually, because it presumes that the people who work at their online daily hyperlinked journals are militarist warmongers throttling freiheit and demokratie through the pounding on the keyboards - that the expression of opinion is somehow warlike.I dislike "blog" even

2002-04-08T23:48:00.000-04:00

Eyekicking style toward clarity and graceJust when you've gotten used to James Lileks' addictable daily product, ignoring the medium for the message in the daily inquiry to the state of the Gnat - he offers up gems like the following:Had a horrible thought today: how long until Al-Aqsa sends pregnant women to commit suicide bombings? There’s certainly nothing in their moral construct that would

2002-04-05T17:03:00.000-05:00

Joseph Aaron has some interesting comments.I apologize for my terse lack of elegance. I really don't have very much to say right now. I mean, I do have a great deal to say, but I don't quite know how to say it without bursting a few seams.Example One:1) I could make a few comments about Adam Shapiro. I know that Gary Farber has, and a bunch of other web-loggers have done the same.I disagree

2002-04-05T15:46:00.000-05:00

Irena Z. is back from Jerusalem tonight. She interviewed Avigdor Lieberman and other leaders of the Yisroel Beiteinu party, and ate pastries bought from a coffee-deli-bakery in Jerusalem hours before it was bombed last week - before the Pesach massacre. She said some interesting things about what's going on, which I will post later.She edits Vecherniy NY, an American Russian language newspaper

2002-03-31T21:40:00.000-05:00

A weekIt's been a week. I thought about doing an April Fools' thing, but I like being mopey and Rhine-massacre-apocalyptic.As if I could post anything worthwhile. As if anything I had to say at the moment would have any redeeming value. It's been five days since the Seder massacre. It's been three days since the beginning of the police-sweep action proper. Time. That is what I have been

2002-03-25T00:23:00.000-05:00

PassoverIn years past, Pesach was a comfortable pitstop halfway through spring, a time of year when we gathered to re-enact ancient ritual, but mostly to eat macaroons, gefilte fish, matzoh, and complain about the constipation inflicted by the last. This year, everything is different.Joshua Micah Marshall posted a couple of comments to his weblog here and here, about his aversion to the concept

2002-03-17T13:48:00.000-05:00

Larson-B has collapsed.While this is the first time I've been able to post to Plastic Words in a week, it isn't the last.I lived for a year, last year, underneath Joe Sabia, the Cornell student who is the author of this turgid and nasty piece. I never, ever saw him take somebody home at night. But he did have his Campus Republicans on staff on Election Night - pounding beer and doing waves for

2002-03-12T00:20:00.000-05:00

Things look better?

2002-03-11T18:09:00.000-05:00

What I posted to RASFF the day after the attack: Path: oemcomputerNewsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandomFrom: djg7@cornell.edu (David Joseph Greenbaum)Subject: Re: WTC DisasterOrganization: Cornell UniversityMessage-ID: <9nof2u$11c_002@cit.cornell.edu> References: <1ezktjb.uear7hvmhxeaN%adaldan@nit.it.invalid> <9nlilp$bc4$2@dent.deepthot.org> <3B9F705D.D36D7769@mdx.ac.uk> <3b9f9559.15063609@

2002-03-10T17:55:00.000-05:00

The folly of living up to the stereotypeAfter a few ill-advised attempts to enter the current-events fray in blogdom (particularly my unilateral declaration of genocidal war on Glenn Reynolds for writing something dicky), I basically gave up on the idea of being a self-referential, interblog-linking uberpundit, shucking the crass world of the fray for snarky commentary in the discussion areas of

2002-03-10T15:42:00.000-05:00

The Chinese Food System: a fearful tourist's fallible snapshotThe Buffet at the Beijing Marco Polo. Cadogan, Lonely Planet, Frommer’s, Fodor’s, and the relatively little known Beijing Walks all advised against eating fresh vegetables or cold foods in China. Sometimes the reasons given were relatively simple – that the state of the art in kitchen hygiene in China is still rather low, and the

2002-03-09T09:40:00.000-05:00

The nones of MarchZygmunt Bauman: one of the premier sociologists writing on issues of modernity, identity, and the revenge of ambivalenceThink about how modern Islamism is, in the context of the following quote:Narrating InhumanityDehumanizing definitions of the enemy are not new in human history and hardly a peculiar feature of the modern age. They accompanied most wars - perhaps any war.

2002-03-09T09:34:00.000-05:00

Adding Chris Johnson (Midwest Conservative Journal) to my blog list, despite the fact that his politics sometimes set my teeth a grinding..

2002-03-08T11:03:00.000-05:00

'Nother Beijing SonnetTop of the Town sits on East Chang'an StreetCapitalist people's palace of wealthMachers and scheibers in Mao's shadow meetRich, that no furtive sin impels them to stealth.Replacing poverty with massive goods glutsParty and businessmen practise their swingslearning the good western art of golf puttswhile bank accounts grow on commerce's wings.By Tian'an'men Square, this

2002-03-06T12:36:00.000-05:00

Just kill me now. I'm done. Stick a fork in me. My juices run clear and hot.Why, I do ask, a million times over in the serenely quiet unmolested airport parking lot, is it that that crap begins at the legal-political border? (for a plane on an international flight is considered to be the territory of the destination power) China works like heavily staffed clockwork. Things are very clean. A

2002-03-04T21:42:00.000-05:00

Just like the Soviets and sundry Eastern Europeans of yore, the Chinese do not have a freely convertible currency, so I am burning the yuan that I bought on my last day, getting value for service here at the internet center of the Beijing international airport, instead of getting back half the dollars I paid for my wad of yuan. also, I bought a phone card, a bottle of real cheap Szechuan rice

2002-03-03T01:27:00.000-05:00

Am posting to Plastic Words from the China Post office on Jiangguo Men Jie, about a kilometer west of the Silk Alley (tourist trap! tourist trap! what the hell, I bought a bunch of pretty shirts for twenty bucks.) and I have run smack dab into the famed Chinese government internet censorship. I can't reach my email nor newsgroups, but oddly enough, I can update the blog. How odd. Well, China

2002-03-02T03:28:00.000-05:00

The first of a cycle of sonnets describing my trip to Beijing Always already, the art of tea brewAs ceremony, celebration, art,Practise, joy, culture, good deep and true,From Japan articulated in part.Tea is Chinese, old like hills with man names-Tea Ceremony is modern, novel.In tourist shops deployed in timely framesTo send porcelain sold on foreign travel.By tailored ritual, lives are sped

2002-03-01T05:33:00.000-05:00

A short notification: I am now in Beijing, and shall be for the next five days. Thanks for your forbearance. I promise to post the completed essay on kosher butchery when I get back. I shall also buy a laptop, for the next time I travel to Beijing.

2002-02-24T00:58:00.000-05:00

Gans mit GanefKosher goose is a rare and wonderful thing. Alright, it is a fatty, gamey, rich, mouthwatering, tasty treat when basted with honey and rotisseried for hours and hours. I want to sing a song to goose. Ich habe den gans ganz gegessen. Caper, caper, caper. Capers are tasty too. But not as tasty as goose, good, rich, roasted goose. Thank you, Herr Bierig und Frau Schwartz!Serious

2002-02-21T19:03:00.000-05:00

Daniel Pearl is dead.As reported on the Diane Rehm show, the scuttlebutt about the videotape of his murder is that his last words were, "I am a Jew, and my father was a Jew."Daniel Pearl is a martyr, to modernity and to God.May the merciful Father who dwells on high, in his infinite mercy, remember those saintly, upright and blameless souls, the holy communities who offered their lives for the

2002-02-21T10:23:00.000-05:00

What fatuous rat-bastard arrogant mocking crap!The thrice-god-damned BBC - of course.First they cover the Intifada in Israel with the loosest fitting figleafs of objectivity - one can see the lust expressed - then they shut down the shortwave broadcasts of their decent cultural fare to North America, so that the only stuff I get to listen to is their redolent barnyard news and public affairs

2002-02-21T00:05:00.000-05:00

Voyagant en Chine... Cinq heures en queue pour un visa...Well, I know that they don't speak French in the People's Republic, but French is the language of diplomacy. Traveling to China without a diplomatic passport means that one needs a visa, obtainable by mail or in person at a Chinese consulate or embassy. So I went to New York on Tuesday to get my visa.Cheap Trip to China: an Anticipatory

2002-02-20T20:34:00.000-05:00

I am sick of the palindrome.The World produced by PRI and the BBC, just broadcast a story about palindromic time, making it the sixth piece I've heard today on the marvelous bit-O-time occurring about 8:02pm this evening.To all of them, I say, social construction of reality and !booga-booga!That's enough of that.

2002-02-14T15:13:00.000-05:00

Query - who's checking my blog from Cornell? Just curious if it's an old friend.

2002-02-11T00:19:00.000-05:00

There are many, many schools of historiography, and until recently – until the last fifteen years or so, none of them were concerned with relating the detailed life of individuals not at the center of great narratives. There’s been a raft of brilliant work in biography and analysis about the famous. But little or nothing about the humble, unless the story is didactic, and the subject an

2002-02-10T10:19:00.000-05:00

Some comments coming up on the practise of alltägsgeschichte: the history of everyday life, through the ages.

2002-02-09T00:38:00.000-05:00

Nearly time for me to gay shlaufen - but I have a note from Robert Graves, regarding scoundrels of old, and their modern ersatz. A little late but no worse for wear: Wigs and BeardsIn the bad old days a bewigged country squireWould never pay his debts, unless at cards;Shot, angled, urged his pack through standing grain,Horsewhipped his tenantry, snorted at the arts,Toped himself under the table

2002-02-08T11:46:00.000-05:00

Hey, Gary. So, I ran a Nexis search on Kheimas Nimr and found nothing, and the only citations for "Palestinian & hanging & 1988" pulled up an April 3, 1988 AP story on a Palestinian electrocuting himself while hanging up a PLO flag from a utility pole. I think it's safe to say that no Kheimas Nimr was ever hanged by Israeli settlers. I'll have further comments about the olive-branch-clad

2002-02-08T01:39:00.000-05:00

Uh, who bought off the blogger banner ad? Inquiring correspondent wants to know.

2002-02-07T21:09:00.000-05:00

That Al-Qaeda training manualThey released it. Yeah, it's agitprop. Read it anyway.Martyrs were killed, women were widowed, children were orphaned, men were handcuffed, chaste women's heads were shaved, harlots' heads were crowned, atrocities were inflicted on the innocent, gifts were given to the wicked, virgins were raped on the prostitution alter...After the fall of our orthodox caliphates

2002-02-07T03:35:00.000-05:00

Ah, yes. Thank you, Gary. I still beat you to the subject by four hours. No ZOG conspiracy to mock Wernie-Bernie Heisenbergalicious, nosireebob. Yeah, I'm up late. I'm in pain. Pain Pain Pain. There's gotta be some way to cut off my body below the belly button so I can get some sleep. I hate back problems. Hate Hate Hate. And the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory that doesn't beat the poop

2002-02-06T23:50:00.000-05:00

My instant outrage button gets very reliably pushed whenever the subject of Nazis come up. In the interest of full disclosure, why, yes, I am a Jew, a yekke in fact. My family fled from Hitler in '35, '39, and '40; both of my grandfathers were interned at Dachau for months after Reichskristallnacht. But that's not what gets me roused right this second - it's always a fresh source of bilirubin

2002-02-05T12:05:00.000-05:00

We, the righteous of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, declare war to the knife on Glenn Reynolds: this odious, smarmy, bare-faced turd is the cause:READER DOUG LEVENE has this Enron-related observation: Forgive me for venting, but here it is: Leftists claim that they are for "people before profits." For Ford to save $10.00/car at the cost of one life/million cars/year is an unacceptable tradeoff.

2002-02-05T01:07:00.000-05:00

Kenneth Lay is pulling a Judge Crater. Good historical comparison time, via Google, Lexis-Nexis, and Proquest: The tale of Equity Funding as described in this 1999 TheStreet article. There's fraud, and then there's the Equity Funding scandal. The fraud at Equity Funding Corp. of America ranks as a landmark event in the history of cooking the books. In 1972, the seller of mutual funds and

2002-02-04T00:36:00.000-05:00

I want to do an Enron dance - something with kicks and twirls, long gobs of blurted poesy and girlish chatter. The Washington Post tells us that Special Report Reveals Secrets of Chewco - a nice little article describing how two water-carriers lifted for Andrew Fastow for almost four years, parlaying a $130,000 investment into $10.5 million, compleat with $2 mil in operating fees.

2002-02-02T22:10:00.000-05:00

Um. Enron. No - I'm waiting for my better thing to do on a Saturday night - why do you ask? The New York Times offers an Enron triplet: 1) Influence Lost, Ex-Enron Chief Faces Congress 2) Enron Panel Finds Inflated Profits and Few Controls 3) Panel Finds Rush to Hide Losses and Enrich a Few How to put this? The senior management of Enron embiggened themselves on delicious, greasy

2002-02-02T20:09:00.000-05:00

Zu viel mehr yidlaches! This really pisses me off. Here's the situation: you're a Sephard, a Litvak, or a richtig echte yidl, (un)happily living under the customary boot of goyische oppression in European or Near Eastern golus. Bang! Pogroms, the Holocaust, the great expulsion of Middle Eastern Jewry from their homes - all of youse folks not killed or diverted to America go to Medinat

2002-02-02T18:14:00.000-05:00

Patrick Nielsen Hayden is alive!

2002-01-31T10:23:00.000-05:00

They're going to tango for debt relief! That's right - anti-globalization protesters will sway and swoon the souls of the plutocrats by making fuzzy bunny paper-mâché dolls, singing old, hackneyed, and boring protest songs, and by dancing the tango at New York's Finest Riot Control, Inc. It makes me sick. It really does - heartsick, because there are, believe it or not, valid issues that

2002-01-30T14:09:00.000-05:00

This morning, I watched an middle-aged woman drive her Toyota SUV the length of my block to mail a letter in the corner mailbox. My street is six houses long; running from the northwest to the southeast, it terminates at a creosoted wooden sea-wall nine feet tall. The Atlantic Ocean is one hundred and fifty feet south of that wall. I live on an island; nowhere does Absecon island rise higher

2002-01-30T13:59:00.000-05:00

It was disconcerting to go walking out on the beach this morning - a conjunction of sun-moon gravity, high-pressure, and I think a whirlpool Sargasso sea-monster sucked down the water level about two feet; the beach gained a lot more margin. Of course, it could also have been this winter's heroically proportioned beach erosion. But then, I live on the barrier islands of the Jersey shore, and

2002-01-23T11:03:00.000-05:00

TNR Online | Bored of the Rings by Richard Jenkyns (print) I have a fish-bone, or two, to pick with Senhor Jenkyns. He's right about so many things, and wrong about so many more. More later.

2002-01-21T15:24:00.000-05:00

World-Wide Curries Oh, dear god, this is brilliant. Now I only need the spices.

2002-01-20T01:22:00.000-05:00

Just so Gary Farber doesn't faint from ignored despair, I blog him now. Go visit Gary's amygdala, and revel in the link-filled ditso-blatso Internet-fantasyland that Gary so kindly maintains. There's a comment I could make about the videos I watched in Jim Maas's* PSYCH 101 lecture, in which a cat had wires implanted in its tiny little table-spoon sized brain's amygdala. The poor thing got

2002-01-14T19:15:00.000-05:00

Taliban and Al-Qaeda prisoners do not merit protection as POW's under the Third Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. I've been looking for the strict US statement on how it viewed the Taliban; it seems that in all statements regarding the Taliban, the US government has jumped through hoops to avoid recognizing them as sovereign, in any rhetorical way. Bush's

2002-01-09T15:55:00.000-05:00

Economic Simulations I found this neat game last year when I was down with double-barrel pneumonia - I wasted a goodly number of hours on the shareware version, and I decided to upgrade last fall, to see the full extent of the simulation. It's the best computerized stock market game I've ever seen. There are random events, stock prices very by corporate returns, and the whole thing,

2002-01-04T03:01:00.000-05:00

The Great American Umbrage Machine Some months ago on Usenet, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Kevin Maroney, Martin Wisse, and I discussed an article by Jonathan Rauch in the April 2001 edition of the New Republic. (Go a-googling an' if ye wish for the thread, Usenet is like blog-space, but faster). Rauch was writing about the ubiquity and power of the 'unwritten rules': the net set of uncodified

2002-01-02T00:56:00.000-05:00

I named this - my new log - after a clever little book of the same name by Uwe Pörksen, published by Penn State Press. The book was given to me by a good friend (the copy editor who vetted the English translation) because of my interest in the Taylorization and subversion of language. At the time, I was translating into English LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen (Lingua Tertii Imperii: the