Jo S. Wun's Blog, page 19

Semicolonoscopy

Here's some rhyming thoughts
To do with 'shoulds' and 'oughts'!
In poetic punctuations
(Such tiresome botherations)
It's all about the flow!
For with it, you must go,
Sync'pating words for meter
So it will never peter
Out!

Men wearing sparkling yellow jackets

Rick K. and the Allnighters play their cover version of ZZ Top's Sharp Dressed Man. Not much I can say but "watch it"…it's a visual thing.

Tip o' the hat: Coverville

Tiananmen Square: Remember the Tank Man

Tomorrow, June 5th, will be the 21st anniversary of the day the Tank Man stood in front of a line of tanks and gave them a piece of his mind. It was the day after the Chinese government ordered the army to crush the protests centred in Tiananmen Square, in what has rightly been called a massacre.

Being a bloke, I ought to use an expression like 'it fires me up' to describe the effect that watching the Tank Man in action has on me, but the truth is it fills me with all sorts of emotions, and...

Plinka Plinka Plonk

I was scanning down the list of tracks on Beatles Complete On Ukulele by Roger & Dave when, right there in the number three spot, I espied You Never Give Me Your Money performed by Peter Buffett. No, surely not. This couldn't be someone with a genuine connection to Warren Buffett, he of bags-o-money fame.

But indeed it is. Apart from detailed, but unsubstantiated, information about the song and how it came to be written, the song page reveals that Peter Buffett is Warren's son. It turns out...

NABST

Not Another Blogging Software Test!

Yep. 'Fraid so. This one is Zoundry Raven. It doesn't sport a 'drop pad' like Qumana but it does seem to be more comprehensive in the actual blog-editing-features stakes and also in its integration with WordPress. So, sorry Qumana. Step aside!

I rather like the Raven logo too.

Powered by Zoundry Raven

A Test of Qumanity

If you have no interest in blogging software then skip this post

I'm trying out Qumana, using it to write this post. I'm not sure if I will use it permanently but it's always good to give things a proper test run before making decisions. Having suffered an internet outage yesterday, during which time I could not compose any blog posts (yes, I know…a major disaster), the feature which attracted me to Qumana is the ability to write posts offline.

Whether that feature is sufficient to keep me...

A passing thought

There is a threshold in most people's lives which probably slips by unremarked and unnoticed at the time it is crossed. Indeed, I doubt that anyone collates the data needed to identify it, and it's a fairly safe bet that anyone who did, if it is even possible, would be viewed as a rather weird specimen.

Thinking about it further, I suspect some, perhaps most, cross over this threshold, forwards and back again, several times, but eventually it seems inevitable that it will be crossed one final ...

A mellifluous mêlée

Does it get your goat when a writer begins an opinion piece by writing, "As a writer,  …"?

Well, as a goatherd*, I'd just like to ask what exactly is it supposed to mean when someone writes, "as a writer"? Mr Hitler was a writer, among other things, as were Mr Zedong, Mr Gibran, Ms Blyton, Mr Twain and –, well you can make your own endless list of writers with wildly different outlooks and agendas, which will unavoidably be incomplete because you will not be able to include all the people who ...

Patent Wars

In the On This Day email newsletter for May 26th from Reference.com, one of the items was:

1946 – A patent was filed in the United States for the H-bomb.

Yep. That's right. Someone filed a patent for a hydrogen bomb. A little websearchery reveals that the 'someone' was actually two people, the most likely candidates being Ulam and Teller (presumably before Penn changed his name?).

However, there is also a claim, apparently made by the Russians, that "on May 28, 1946, Fuchs and von Neumann filed ...

I think I've been censored

I was recently invited to join a discussion group on a well-known social network for people who love books. The group has a very broad focus and pretty much invites discussions on any topic, the main thrust of the group seeming to be to accumulate as many members as possible. However, the introductory message includes the words Any swearing (the "seven main" curse words) or explicit material will not be tolerated.

Yeah, you guessed. My curiosity piqued, I started a discussion enquiring which c...