This is an incredible deal: buy a first edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and get Douglas Adams’s typewriter along with it. According to the seller, it is “as certain as can be that Adams wrote his most famous work ‘The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy’ on this Hermes Standard 8″. And […]
Over at boingboing blogger Mark Frauenfelder has a brief post about a vending machine selling “ideas for things to do”. It just seems like a brilliant idea. As you can see from the picture, it’s just 50 cents per idea, and you might get a toy “and a map “if fun idea requires travel […]
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Jun
18
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
June 18, 2008 | 3 Comments
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Reading Michael Dirda’s thoughts on being James Bond, I couldn’t help thinking what it would be like to be able to be a character in a book. And which character would I be? It’s an old idea. In fact a short story by Woody Allen, The Kugelmass Episode, from his book Without Feathers, is all […]
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Jun
13
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
June 13, 2008 | 2 Comments
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Recently I was walking to an appointment (with gas prices the way they are I’m happy to either walk or take the bus when I can, in spite of the heat) and walked by a guy on the sidewalk playing a guitar and singing. Even though Nashville is “Music City” you don’t often see street […]
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Jun
5
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
June 5, 2008 | 1 Comment
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For almost anyone starting out as a writer one of the biggest obstacles has to be the obligatory cover-letter. You’ve worked hard on something, you have enough confidence to send it out into the world, but the cover-letter is where the editor gets his or her first impression, and that can be pretty intimidating. Your […]
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Jun
4
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
June 4, 2008 | 1 Comment
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Spell checkers, or maybe spellcheckers, are funny things. Depending on what you’re using, you might get corrected if you misspell something. For instance I misspell “misspell” all the time–that second “s” just don’t look right to me–so my spellchecker picks it up and automatically corrects it. Language is flexible, though. Maybe I want to say […]
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May
13
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
May 13, 2008 | 1 Comment
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Responding to, and adding to, an article by William Deresiewicz, who said that literary criticism is “losing its will to live”, Jonathan Gottschall has come up with an astounding proposal: make literary criticism more like science. Blaming the decline in criticism’s relevance on the critics themselves, he says,
We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate […]
People are sometimes shocked when they learn I used to smoke. Well, it was a very brief period in college, and while I could say I gave it up for my health or because it’s awful for the environment, the simple truth is I gave it up because I realized it just wasn’t for me. […]
Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow has a brief article with a link to a short Czech film from 1957 which has a surprising vision of the kitchen of the future: shopping by television, foods quickly prepared in glass ovens, the cokery (sic) book replaced by punch cards…well, at least they were right about stoves which […]
In an article in EWeek, Jim Rapoza offers a broader definition of the term “hacker”, saying, “That hacker could be you.” Condensing an idea he put forth in an essay for the book Jack Bauer for President: Terrorism and Politics in 24, he explains, “A pretty good definition of a hacker is someone who knows […]
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