John Crowley's Blog, page 50

Oh ho

Wonderful outpouring of wit and perspicuity on the palindrome query.  Now the world (that part of it that visits here) has a choice of many alternatives:  Lexel!  Mirrorim! Reflexelfer!  Bon nob!  (My own favorites.)

I haven't been posting much -- computer busted, was in San Diego and Santa Monica on a "working vacation" (nice oxymoron), then starting my new semester.  A reading at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, fine store, all the books you know you want and many you find out you want when y...

Challenge

 

An anonymous responder to the palindrome entry is saddened that the word for a palindrome (i.e., "palindrome") is not itself a palindrome.  I bet we could bend our collective mind to that problem, and (nice a word as "palindrome" is) come up with a palindromic alternative.

Time Mirror

A new acquaintance, Thomas Woodrow, producer of the film Bass Ackwards, sneds me a note that today (yesterday for some of you, tomorrow -- maybe -- for some others, is a palndrome day:

01022010

Nice!  (If meaningless).

More 3D

 

I have morte than once referred (in a review of Nicholson Baker's The Fermata, e.g.) to a partly 3D film I saw when I was in college, a very cheap softcore sniggery porn film in which a sort of milktoast character acquires a pair of glasses that allow him to see people without their clothes on.  The audience was instructed to put their glasses on when he put his on, to see what he saw (in bad red/green 3D).  I have long thought that this film was The Immoral Mr Teas, and so identified it in ...

Avatar

 Yes, I went out and  made history, seeing Avatar on the day after Christmas.  I found it delightful all through -- I was never bored and often thrilled and elated.  That was by the astonishing and convincing 3D effects, the care and attention lavished on every detail of every moment -- the 300M that Cameron spent was all on show.  The scenes in the Floating Mountains (whose gravitational oddity was never explained; maybe something ot do with the huge planet around which the moon Pandora revo...

Health Care Reform

 No, just kidding.  But there is a small but annoying problem in Health Care I am trying to solve.  At least where I live, and I bet for almost everyone with health insurance, it's very difficult to avoid making several trips to the pharmacy to have various prescriptions filled.  If you take (say) four pills a day, and will forever (or until death parts you from them), and you have prescriptions for a month's worth of each, it would be very nice to be able to go to the drugstore and pick them...

Find the Error

.... in this NY Times sentence (the actual sentence is longer but the rest is not relevant):

As a relatively new phenomenon in the crowded arena of journalists whose specialty it is to report the news of the catwalks, fashion bloggers have ascended from the nosebleed seats to the front row...

crowleycrow @ 2009-12-19T16:15:00

  Comments are closed on Climate Change, a highly contentious issue which I actually never meant to raise. Grammar Whiz winners are  anselmo_b   for one understanding ("hit" as a noun) -- his the funniest of several takes running this way.  ANd  joculum  and  proximoception  for the sense the article had ("hit" as a verb).  It sounds slightly better in the original:  

These resorts, which boasted top-flight entertainment — Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Don Rickles were among the comedians who...

Grammar Whiz

 
These are usually guessed as as soon as I put them up, which makes me feel like a fool for having stumbled over them when my scanning eye lights on one in the paper (I mean the online ones, natch). 

ANyway, make a grammatically correct and intelligible sentence out of this by adding words to either end or both ends. No c=altering the phrase itself (e.g. inserted punctuation.

as the humidity hit to mambo