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I have been alerted to the fact that
this site is reproducing the content of Languagehat without attribution. I can't find any way to contact them. Is there anything I can do about this?
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 7:27 AM on April 2, 2008
(22 comments)
A mindbending logic puzzle.
A thousand people on the island, 900 brown-eyed and 100 blue-eyed; anyone who learns their own eye color must kill themself the next day; a visitor mentions that there is a blue-eyed person on the island; what happens? Nothing, you say, because they already know that? Wrong. Further details at the Terry Tao post linked above, but don't scroll down below the boxed description unless you want hints and/or spoilers.
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 7:47 AM on February 15, 2008
(391 comments)
I'm helping edit a dictionary, and I just got to the
skirt entry, which contains the definition "informal: women regarded as sexually desirable." Now, I'm in my fifties and I think of that sense as "before my time," but before I go and tell them to add "dated" I want to double-check with the hip young MeFi crowd: do you know anybody younger than Grandpa Simpson who talks about "chasing skirt"?
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 3:38 PM on February 11, 2008
(91 comments)
What's the downside of taking a house off the market temporarily (say, a couple of months)? My inlaws are trying to sell a house, it's taking a while, and the real estate agent suggested this so it wouldn't seem stale. Any reason not to do it?
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 1:39 PM on February 4, 2008
(14 comments)
"Hugh Massingberd,
a celebrated former obituaries editor of
The Telegraph of London who made a once-dreary page required reading by speaking frankly, wittily and often gleefully ill of the dead, became the recipient of his own services after dying in West London on Christmas Day." The linked
NY Times obit (by Margalit Fox;
print version) contains many good quotes, like "The Telegraph’s send-off of one Lt. Col. Geoffrey Knowles, 'who as a subaltern was bitten in the buttocks by a bear — he survived but the bear expired'";
The Telegraph's own
obit is much longer (and, of course, unsigned) and contains, along with more good zingers, a well-written account of his life ("The inevitable consequence of his bingeing proved another triumph of style, as Massingberd, a tall, slim and notably handsome youth with hollowed-out cheeks, transmogrified into an impressively corpulent presence whose moon face lit up with Pickwickian benevolence").
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 12:08 PM on December 30, 2007
(21 comments)
Yesterday when I visited MeFi for the first time, I got "no links and no comments posted since your last visit." I figured it was some momentary glitch. But the same thing happened today, so I'm wondering if anybody else has this problem. When I go to MetaTalk and AskMe, it has the correct number of new posts/comments. (Firefox 2.0.0.11 on Windows XP.)
posted to MetaTalk by languagehat
at 7:13 AM on December 15, 2007
(27 comments)
"The neighborhood of Bab al Sheik
dates from a time, more than a thousand years ago, when Baghdad ruled the Islamic world... Ten centuries later, Bab al Sheik is less grand, but still extraordinary: it has been spared the sectarian killing that has gutted other neighborhoods, and Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Christians live together here with unusual ease." A
NY Times story (by Sabrina Tavernise and Karim Hilmi) about interesting people in an interesting place. (
Print version for them as wants one.)
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 4:04 PM on November 13, 2007
(15 comments)
Other Women's Voices:
"Below are links that will take you to passages from over 125 women writers. The entries are on women who produced a substantial amount of work before 1700, some or all of which has been translated into modern English. Each entry will tell you about the print sources from which the translated passages are taken; it will also tell you of useful secondary sources and Internet sites, when those are available." An amazing resource. (Via
wood s lot.)
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 6:49 AM on July 26, 2007
(20 comments)
Has anybody had experience with
Charter Communications (in western Massachusetts, if that makes a difference)? My wife and I are moving to
Hadley in a couple of weeks and are thinking of taking advantage of Charter's bundle (available through the end of the month) of basic cable + high-speed internet + phone service (unlimited calling in US) for $69.97/mo. This seems like a good deal. Anybody have experience with them? And if you live in the Pioneer Valley, how worried should we be about the likelihood of an electricity failure disrupting our phone service?
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 12:21 PM on July 19, 2007
(13 comments)
Philosophy of History
is what the page is called; it's by a philosophy professor,
Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D., who's a libertarian and obsessed with Leonard Nelson and the Friesian School, whatever the hell that is. Never mind all that. If you scroll down past the essays and the Military History section and the calendars and the book reviews, you get to the Reference Resources. As he says, "Not all of history may be covered here, but a very extensive fragment of it certainly is." Take, as one tiny example,
Margraves & Counts of Flanders. There's a longish introduction and a colored map, then there are lists of rulers and detailed genealogies accompanied by more text, then similarly for the Counts of Artois, the Kings & Dukes of Brittany, the Counts of Anjou, the Dukes of Normandy, the Counts of Blois & Champagne, the Counts of Toulouse, the Dukes of Aquitaine and Dukes of Gascony, the Lords & Counts of Foix, the Kings and Lords of Man, the Dukes of Marlborough and Earls of Spencer (including a detailed list of the Vanderbilts), the Dukes of Buccleuch, Grafton, & St. Albans, and the Dukes of Berwick & Fitzjames. That's one page. There are dozens and dozens of them. The Prime Ministers of the Dominions, the Kings of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, the Islâmic Rulers of North Africa, the Emperors of India, China, & Japan, all the way down to the Mangïts of Bukhara, 1747-1920. If you have any interest in history, This Site's For You.
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 3:31 PM on June 23, 2007
(48 comments)
Anybody know of a good computer repairman/shop in or near Pittsfield, Mass? My wife's Dell desktop has developed an alarming hum (sometimes loud, sometimes soft), and she'd like to have someone take a look at it, but it would be nice not to have to play throw-a-dart-at-the-Yellow-Pages.
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 6:23 AM on June 8, 2007
(7 comments)
I'm working on a book of international curses and insults and I'm supposed to write a section on the U.S. and Canada. Now, I have no problem finding examples of invective by Yanks, but (like a typical Yank) I'm completely at a loss when it comes to the Great White North. I'd appreciate any pointers to good use of wicked language by Canadians (doesn't have to be obscene; cf. Twain's "Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward..."), old or new, online or off. Thanks!
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 8:52 AM on May 21, 2007
(43 comments)
What was the boat journey up the Rhone (and the Saone and down the Seine) to Paris like in the old days, before the internal combustion engine and the damming of the river? Where were the portages? How long did it take? Any resources greatly appreciated, from memoirs to histories to (well researched) novels, online or off.
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 11:30 AM on May 8, 2007
(6 comments)
Horton's Historical Articles.
"Gerald (Jerry) Horton has always been interested in American History, particularly the era from 1750 to 1820. Upon his retirement in 2000, he found more time for reading and research. It was through this research Jerry became intrigued with the Mohawk Valley during the Revolutionary War." It's a narrow focus, but if you're interested in the American Revolution the articles on this site provide incredibly detailed timelines, with impartial attention to all sides.
What Happened to 7,000 People?, for example, explains just how the population of the Mohawk Valley dropped from 10,000 to 3,000 people in a few years in a "civil war that pitted neighbor against neighbor."
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 6:46 AM on March 30, 2007
(12 comments)
The Bookseller's Story, Ending Much Too Soon.
Anthony Shadid of the
Washington Post writes about Mohammed Hayawi, "a bald bear of a man," who ran the Renaissance Bookstore on "Baghdad's storied Mutanabi Street." Back in 2005, Phillip Robertson wrote a
Salon article about Al Mutanabbi Street, "Baghdad's legendary literary cafe, the Shabandar, " and Hajji Qais Anni's stationery store: "Hajji Qais had been on Al Mutanabbi street for 10 years and the vendors all knew him... He wore a beard and was also known as a devout Sunni who had no problem hiring Shia workers or spending time with Christian colleagues." Both Hayawi and Hajji Qais were killed by bombs, the cafe has been gutted, and the street that "embodied a generation-old saying: Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads" is no longer its old self. "When the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, it was said that the Tigris River ran red one day, black another. The red came from the blood of nameless victims, massacred by ferocious horsemen. The black came from the ink of countless books from libraries and universities. Last Monday, the bomb on Mutanabi Street detonated at 11:40 a.m. The pavement was smeared with blood. Fires that ensued sent up columns of dark smoke, fed by the plethora of paper." Two views of a part of Baghdad that doesn't make the news much.
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 2:14 PM on March 13, 2007
(42 comments)
What Brazil tells us about torture today.
A thoughtful discussion by Clive James of torture in the context of the movies in general and Terry Gilliam's
Brazil in particular. Warning: occasional descriptions of awful behavior, and the reader may have his opinion of humanity lowered. "The historical evidence suggests that on the rare occasions when a state begins again in what a fond humanitarian might think of as a condition of innocence, a supply of young torturers is the first thing it produces... In the Nazi and Soviet cellars and camps, people were regularly tortured for information they did not possess: i.e., they were tortured just for the hell of it."
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 6:45 AM on February 25, 2007
(50 comments)
I know you people like words and language, and I
know you like Google, so when I found a clip of Erin McKean giving a
talk about dictionaries at Google, I thought "Normally, I wouldn't watch a 54-minute video of someone giving a talk, but this one was really interesting, and maybe my fellow MeFites will think the same thing." (Be sure and stick around for the Q&A session at the end; Google people, as you might expect, ask really interesting questions.) Erin McKean is not only the editor of
The New Oxford American Dictionary, she's got a
dressmaking blog. And if you don't feel like watching a video right now,
here's a transcript of an hour-long online chat at Wordsmith.Org from a couple years ago. (Video link via
Taccuino di traduzione.)
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 7:26 AM on February 17, 2007
(34 comments)
A Photochrom is a color photo lithograph, produced from a black-and-white negative.
They were especially popular in the 1890s and were frequently used on postcards.
Photochrom.com presents "over 1,300 different images of United States, Canada, Mexico and Cuba." But that's nothing—the Library of Congress
presents 5,000 of them, from all over the world. The first page is nature shots from Ireland; I suggest clicking on the page links at the top, finding a region that interests you, and using the PREV PAGE - NEXT PAGE links to find more. Some favorites:
a street in Fiume (now Rijeka), the
harbor of Algiers, the
outskirts of Jerusalem. (LoC link via
wood s lot.)
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 8:49 AM on January 14, 2007
(28 comments)
How do I find a gutter cleaner?
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 9:10 AM on January 5, 2007
(22 comments)
An Eye for the World.
"Shotaro Shimomura XXI (1883-1944) was Chairman of The Daimaru Inc., a department store chain... He took these photographs on a subsequent trip around the world in 1934 and 1935." Just two pages of photos, but I find them irresistible—worth it for
this one alone. (Via
wood s lot.)
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 9:00 AM on December 30, 2006
(18 comments)
My Gateway laptop can't tell if there's anything in the E drive. How do I change this?
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 12:05 PM on December 6, 2006
(15 comments)
Ellen Willis was a writer and critic who wrote for the
Voice, the
Nation, and
Dissent, among many others; her
NYU homepage and
Wikipedia entry link to a number of essays and reviews, all of which are worth your time. She didn't make me a feminist, but her writing gave me much of the intellectual framework of my feminism and throughout the depressing retreat of the '80s reminded me there was still humor and hope. (From her
Wikiquote page: "My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.") She
died yesterday, of lung cancer, at the absurdly early age of 64. I'd like to quote from her "Escape from New York" (
Village Voice, July 29-Aug. 4, 1981), an account of a bus trip across the country that shows her inextricable mix of the personal, the political, and the just plain human: [more inside]
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 6:43 PM on November 10, 2006
(15 comments)
CBGB is closing
at the end of the month. Yeah, newsfilter, NYCfilter, say what you will, and the club hasn't "mattered" in decades, but anyone who cares about punk rock will feel the pang. This should probably have been posted by jonmc, but I wanted to do it so I could highlight
this excellent piece by Paul Collins; besides the inevitable "I played CBs" anecdote, there's some wonderful history of the site. [Quote inside.]
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 8:48 AM on October 13, 2006
(110 comments)
Has noscript killed my Firefox, and if so what do I do about it?
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 6:40 AM on September 28, 2006
(8 comments)
After the Romans left
Britain was divided into a number of
Celtic kingdoms that fought with each other and, increasingly, with the
Germanic invaders we know as "Anglo-Saxons." The most famous alleged defender of Celtic Britain, of course, is
King Arthur, but he's more myth than history. What catches my imagination is
The Gododdin (
Welsh original, by
Aneurin), an epic lament for the band of men who gathered at Eiddyn (Edinburgh, main town of
Gododdin) around the year 600 and headed south for a last-ditch battle against the Saxons at Catraeth (probably
Catterick in northern Yorkshire), where they were wiped out. One contingent was from
Elmet (Elfed in the poem), a kingdom that had been holding the line against the invaders in what's now Yorkshire; once Elmet was conquered, there was no stopping them. And all of this history was basic to the poetry of
David Jones, one of the best unknown poets of the previous century, and important to one of the best known,
Ted Hughes (
book with photos). "Men went to Catraeth, familiar with laughter. The old, the young, the strong, the weak."
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 3:28 PM on August 31, 2006
(31 comments)
The cruiser Emden
was launched in 1910. When World War One broke out, she was under the command of Korvettenkapitän Karl Friedrich Max von Müller, with Kapitänleutnant Hellmuth von Mücke as executive officer, who "was as extroverted as his commander was modest." When Graf von Spee, commander of the East Asiatic Squadron, decided to keep it united and head for Chile to coal up, Müller said he'd rather go off on his own and harass British shipping. Spee agreed, and the
Emden embarked on a spree of destruction that made him a hero not only to the Germans but even to the British; when it was over, the
Telegraph said: "It is almost in our hearts to regret that the Emden has been captured and destroyed.... There is not a survivor who does not speak well of this young German, the officers under him and the crew obedient to his orders. The war on the sea will lose some of its piquancy, its humour and its interest now that the Emden has gone."
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 4:05 PM on August 19, 2006
(35 comments)
Matt, you might want to rethink
this deletion. You seem to have taken it as simply random gibberish ("doesn't really make any sense at all"), when it's actually a link to an online code/puzzle; you've allowed those many times before, and people seem to enjoy them. Alongside the jokey comments (like mine), people were working to figure out the code. Maybe reconsider?
posted to MetaTalk by languagehat
at 9:57 AM on August 4, 2006
(57 comments)
Life (Briefly) Near a Supernova
(pdf,
Google cache) by Steven Dutch (UW-Green Bay). What might it be like on a planet orbiting a star that went supernova? "It would take on the order of 100,000 seconds, or about a day, to receive enough energy to vaporize the Earth." Yes, Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven are name-checked. (And yes, the Sun is too small to actually go supernova, killjoy.) Via
the nonist.
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 12:02 PM on July 17, 2006
(19 comments)
This week my blog (languagehat.com) had an unprecedented flood of weird spam; as I was in the midst of deleting another chunk of it, I found myself locked out of my MT control panel (when I try accessing mt.cgi, I get "Invalid login"). Songdog, who helps me with stuff like this, posted a
report at the Movable Type Community Forum, where you can find the horrid details; unfortunately, since I'm still using MT 2.63, there's not much in the way of support, and nobody's responded at the forum. If anybody here has suggestions, I'm all ears and deeply grateful.
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 5:45 PM on July 1, 2006
(22 comments)
Hilton Ruiz is dead.
The wonderful pianist
Hilton Ruiz, who "had been in a coma since May 19, when he was found outside a French Quarter bar with severe head injuries," has died in a New Orleans hospital. He'd played with everyone from Freddie Hubbard and Rahsaan Roland Kirk to Charles Mingus, Betty Carter, Archie Shepp, and Clark Terry. Sad news, especially coming hard on the heels of the loss of
Billy Preston.
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 6:56 AM on June 8, 2006
(16 comments)
Does it make any sense to take out a second trust deed on a house you're trying to sell?
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 3:43 PM on June 5, 2006
(12 comments)
What were the court costs in Jarndyce? (Spoilers inside if you aren't familiar with
Bleak House.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 2:33 PM on May 29, 2006
(2 comments)
When the
Mongols invaded Russia in the 13th century,
legend has it that when they reached the northern city of
Kitezh, the citizens, rather than defending themselves, "engaged in fervent praying, asking god for their redemption. On seeing this, the Mongols rushed to the attack, but then stopped. Suddenly, they saw countless fountains of water bursting from under the ground all around them. The attackers fell back and watched the town submerge into the lake." Ever since,
Kitezh has provided Russians "a platform for imagining what their culture might have been like, had it not been stamped by authoritarian rule." And it gave Rimsky-Korsakov the
plot of his opera the
Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh. [More inside.]
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 1:46 PM on April 19, 2006
(22 comments)
A Dweller in Mesopotamia.
Donald Maxwell was Official Artist to the Admiralty during World War I, and the end of the war found him in what was then called Mesopotamia (now Iraq); he compiled the sketches and paintings he did there into a book which Project Gutenberg has put online. I'm posting it for the frequently beautiful images, but the text is interesting too. He says Baghdad and Basra don't live up to the Westerner's romantic preconceptions ("The first general impression of Basra is that of an unending series of quays along a river not unlike the Thames at Tilbury"), but he also describes age-old scenes that are now gone for good. (Via
wood s lot, one of the few sites I visit every day.)
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 7:12 AM on March 24, 2006
(9 comments)
I'm thinking of traveling with my laptop for the first time. What should I be careful about?
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 6:44 AM on March 24, 2006
(22 comments)
On Sunday, June 25, 1961, New York's famous
Village Vanguard witnessed one of the
greatest live jazz performances ever recorded: the afternoon and evening sets by the Bill Evans Trio (
review).
Evans was one of the great jazz pianists and
Paul Motian has been playing superb drums for half a century now, but it was bassist
Scott LaFaro who made the group something new; where other bassists kept time, he played the bass "as though he were playing a large guitar," and inspired a kind of "simultaneous composition" that left everyone who heard it awed when he joined up with Evans (after working with Stan Getz, Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman).
On June of 1961 the Evans trio had a memorable week at New York’s Village Vanguard; the final day of the engagement, June 25th, was taped in its entirety. On July 3, he played Newport with Stan Getz; it would be the final performance of Scott LaFaro. On July 5 he visited his mother in Geneva [NY], and stayed until it was very late. He was invited to spend the night, but said no; he had to get back to New York. In the early hours of July 6, Frank Ottley and Scott LaFaro died when Scott’s car left the road, hit a tree, and caught fire. Bill Evans was so distraught he did not perform publicly for nearly a year...
[More inside.]
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 11:59 AM on January 23, 2006
(56 comments)
What’s "Sacred" about Violence in Early America?
Susan Juster discusses the "oversized colonial martyr complex" with its attendant paradox: "colonial martyrs were everywhere, religious violence... in short supply." She begins:
One of the most chilling images in early American history is the deliberate firing of Fort Mystic during the Pequot War of 1637. Five hundred Indian men, women, and children died that day, burned alive along with their homes and possessions by a vengeful Puritan militia intent on doing God’s will. "We must burn them!" the militia captain famously insisted to his troops on the eve of the massacre, in words that echo the classic early modern response to heretics. Just five months before, the Puritan minister at Salem had exhorted his congregation in strikingly similar terms to destroy a more familiar enemy, Satan; "We must burne him," John Wheelwright told his parishioners. Indians and devils may have been scarcely distinguishable to many a Puritan, but their rhetorical conflation in these two calls to arms raises a question: Was the burning of Fort Mystic a racial or a religious killing?
She avoids easy answers and makes some interesting connections. If you want to find out more about the Pequot War, there's good material in the History section of
this site. (Main link via
wood s lot.)
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 12:30 PM on January 9, 2006
(35 comments)
I need information and suggestions on dealing with the aftermath of a parent's death, specifically the disposal of house and possessions.
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 12:44 PM on December 28, 2005
(26 comments)
The USC-MSA Compendium of Muslim Texts
is a very useful compilation of essays on various topics, searchable versions of the
Qur'an (uses three different translations) and
hadith (the sayings and traditions of the Prophet), and a
glossary (which is how I discovered the site, while trying to find a good reference for a comment on Falconetti's excellent Maniac Muslim
post). The first of the
Ten Misconceptions About Islam: "Islam is 'the religion of peace' because the Arabic word
Islam is derived from the Arabic word
Al-Salaam which means peace." Their response:
It might seem strange to think of this as a misconception, but in fact it is. The root word of Islam is al-silm which means "submission" or "surrender." It is understood to mean "submission to Allah." In spite of whatever noble intention has caused many a Muslim to claim that Islam is derived primarily from peace, this is not true.
As you can see, they care about accuracy, not just propaganda.
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 6:20 AM on December 6, 2005
(24 comments)
The Day the Sea Came.
The stories of six people caught up in last December's tsunami.
Maisara did not look back. She could hear an odd, ever-louder roar. But she never actually saw what she was running from. Only Anis, looking over her mother's left shoulder, beheld the oncoming water. "Mama, what is that?" the little girl kept yelling.
I know, it's the
Times, it's long, it's old news, but it's absolutely riveting. Great reporting by Barry Bearak, and for this you need a reporter, not a novelist, because you can't make this stuff up.
Part 1 (
printer-friendly),
Part 2 (
printer),
Part 3 (
printer),
Part 4 (
printer).
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 3:25 PM on November 27, 2005
(25 comments)
We all know the story: little Elli, a girl living in the steppes of Kanzas with her dog Totoshka, is blown by a hurricane (stirred up by the wicked witch Gingema) all the way to Magic Land, where she meets the Cowardly Lion, the Iron Woodman, and the scarecrow Strashila and has to make her way to the Emerald City to find the magician Gudvin so she can get back home... What, you don't remember it that way? Didn't you read
The Wizard of the Emerald City and its much-loved sequels
Urfin Jus and his Wooden Soldiers, The Seven Underground Kings, The Fiery God of the Marrans, The Yellow Fog, and
The Mystery of the Deserted Castle? Ah, you're not Russian!
Listen [
RealAudio] to a five-minute description (
on Studio 360) of
Alexander Volkov's Russified versions of Baum (with illustrations by
Leonid Vladimirsky) and how they captivated children and adults in the Soviet Union (you even get a bit of the famous song Мы в город Изумрудный/ Идем дорогой трудной ["We're going to the Emerald City by a difficult road..."]); visit the
Emerald City website (Russian version, where all the links work); and see the wonderful illustrations at
this site, which links to the texts of all six novels (click on Читать...)—in Russian, but the images need no explanation. (Fun fact: the word "Oz" doesn't occur anywhere in the Russian versions.) And if you're interested in other alternate versions, go to
Oz Outside the Famous Forty.
(Via P. Kerim Friedman.)
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 12:17 PM on November 25, 2005
(21 comments)
Does anybody have any idea what's going on with this kind of comment spam? I'm getting scads of it, with no URLs but always a mention of a five-figure number. "I've managed to save up roughly $55085 in my bank account, but I'm not sure if I should buy a house or not. Do you think the market is stable or do you think that home prices will decrease by a lot?"
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 12:50 PM on November 18, 2005
(18 comments)
Angkor Wat guide.
"Published in 1944 in Saigon, republished in 1948 and again in Paris in 1963,
The Monuments of the Angkor Group by Maurice Glaize remains the most comprehensive of the guidebooks and the most easily accessible to a wide public, dedicated to one of the most fabled architectural ensembles in the world." Now online, updated, with maps and photos. (More Angkor Wat links in
this previous post.) Via
Plep.
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 9:20 AM on November 14, 2005
(12 comments)
We'd like my wife's 89-year-old mother to be able to stay with us once in a while, which involves making her as comfortable as possible. Our double-bed futon is very comfortable, but it's in the living room and won't fit in the downstairs study/office, so she has no privacy when she sleeps there. We're thinking of getting a single bed to put in the study, but we don't really want to rearrange everything and have a bed taking up half the room in there for a few visits a year, so ideally it would be something we can put away when not in use. But it has to be comfortable (good mattress) and well built and not excessively expensive. Suggestions?
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 7:57 AM on November 7, 2005
(22 comments)
My sister-in-law loves Motown and my wife and I would like to get her an anthology of the big hits, hopefully not more than three disks (because we can't spend big bucks this Xmas). Motown reissues being a notoriously tricky subject, can anybody recommend one with good sound and good value?
posted to Ask Metafilter by languagehat
at 3:02 PM on October 25, 2005
(11 comments)
Explorion
is a goldmine of travel accounts, from Hakluyt's
Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation and Bartram's
Travels Through North &South Carolina, Georgia, East &West Florida,the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws to the
Journals of Lewis and Clark and Washinton Irving's
Astoria; Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains and Dickens's
Pictures from Italy and Lafcadio Hearn's
Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan (from which I took the post title) to... well, find your own favorites. There's an astonishing amount of stuff there. "Of course you will act according to your own plans, and do what you think best—but
FIND LIVINGSTONE!"
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 6:46 AM on October 17, 2005
(13 comments)
In the First Person
"provides in-depth indexing of more than 2,500 collections of oral history in English from around the world. With future releases, the index will broaden to identify other first-person content, including letters, diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies, and other personal narratives... It allows for keyword searching of more than 260,000 pages of full-text by more than 9,000 individuals from all walks of life." You could start with the
places or
Historical Events listings, or just pick a keyword and dive in. (The post title is from the
first interview in the collection, from July 1930, with He Dog, who was born in the same year as Crazy Horse: "We grew up together in the same band, played
together, courted the girls together and fought together.") Via
wood s lot.
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat
at 2:49 PM on August 27, 2005
(6 comments)
