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May
30
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
May 30, 2009 | 3 Comments
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The strangely compelling thing about The Scripps National Spelling Bee is that most of the words are obscure, rarely used, and sometimes range across different languages, making Kavya Shivashankar’s accomplishment even more extraordinary than the accomplishments of her fellow finalists, all of whom were amazing spellers.
Since I’m bound by an obsessive-compulsive need to go alphabetically, [...]
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May
25
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
May 25, 2009 | 1 Comment
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I was once on a school trip in Spain with a bunch of other kids and we stopped at a restaurant that had been prearranged to serve us a pretty nice lunch. We got fries and cole slaw, and fried rings of something that was salty and slightly fishy and a little bit chewy, but [...]
Whenever I examine language it always surprises me how common, often-used word that we don’t necessarily think of as onomatopoeic still has that quality. Take, for example, the word vicious, which slides across the tongue like a knife. It’s a word that implies its meaning in its very sound. And yet that’s a matter of connotation. [...]
One of the nice things about working in a library is being surprised not just by new books but old books too. Sometimes really old books, like George Washington Carleton’s Our Artist In Cuba, a short little book of fifty funny sketches published in 1865 which a co-worker brought to me. You can see the [...]
Somewhere, I don’t remember where or even when exactly, I heard that the Hindi word “sri” meant “indescribably beautiful”. From what I’ve heard, and from even many pictures I’ve seen, that would describe Sri Lanka, even though the island was known for a very long time by its Tamil name, Ceylon. My fascination with Sri [...]
For most children there’s an inevitable rite of passage that will usually come in their teens, when their parents leave them alone at home for an extended period. It’s a kind of rite of passage, one of the steps into adulthood. For Matt, the protagonist of Elizabeth George Speare’s The Sign of the Beaver, it [...]
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May
17
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
May 17, 2009 | 1 Comment
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A place may become closely associated with something, as Nashville is with country music, for instance. Or a place may be part of a name, particularly with food–think London broil or baked Alaska. There’s only one place that I know, of, though, that has become a word–a prefix, actually–that is distinct from its origin. That is [...]
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May
13
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
May 13, 2009 | 2 Comments
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images from the I Am Art exhibit, Apex Art Gallery
A new art show called “I Am Art” at the Apex Art gallery in New York City considers plastic surgery as art. As Studio 360’s Sarah Lily says, “the faces are normal people who no longer want to be defined by the more extreme features they [...]
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May
11
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
May 11, 2009 | 1 Comment
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As a semi-dedicated listener to Car Talk (when I’m in the car, and it’s on, I’m usually listening) and as someone who loves puzzles, I’m always intrigued by the weekly Puzzler. And by “intrigued” I of course mean “completely baffled and unable to come up with the answer until the next week when I may [...]
There is something about baseball, about the slowness of it, the way, beyond the enclosed diamond of the infield, the game opens up into infinity. Modern myths are told about balls hit so hard they rose into the sky to become stars, usually in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and the bases [...]
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