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This is worth a post 6 hours later--I mean, it's sort of the next day, anyway.
So I was cleaning stuff up this weekend. I got exhausted and as I was about to give up I found an old college diary. I'd planned to plow through it at the beginning of the year.
I was rather sad to note there were only 44 pages. I know I'd looked at it before and was scared about what I might find--if I found anything silly, anything that I'd be embarrassed about, or even anything that showed me my ideas now aren't quite as developed in the last X years as I thought.
Turns out there was a decent combination of everything, with my favorite quote being the probably throwaway (at the time) "Packed my nerf hoop and shower curtain. I'm ready for my final year of college!" (I moved to non university housing.)
I was reading Harvard Lampoon's Harvard Education in a Book and while I'm a bit jealous a cadre of college students could do so well while I had trouble with much of anything, well, it's fun now to read the cultural references that even as late as 1998 might be too obscure.
But I love watching a britcom or reading an old book and seeing the references and seeing which work. Gaines Burgers, MacShakespeare, Senor Wences...fun stuff.
I used to be terrified of dictionaries or encyclopedias probably because they were so big--and I hated paging through things, even though I knew the binary sort way of looking at things. But now it's quite fun.
And of course the very best works, like Asterix, or Bored of the Rings, already have their own internet annotations. Someone beat me to it.
The book doesn't have to be published this year. Just something you read this year.
I tend to keep a lot of my books, since it is relatively simple to do so. My favorite for 2009:
The Go-Between, by L P Hartley. It has the semi-famous, and memorable, first line "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." I read about this first line several times before actually reading the book.
It's one of those dreadfully sad loss-of-innocence books set in England about 100 years ago that just does it right.
Honorable mention to Trenton Lee Stewart's Mysterious Benedict Society for the first 80 pages, a fabulous example of an entrance exam with odd rules.
She even moved with us, from the 15th to the 24th floor. She's not even an official employee, but she's always been there. She was oldish and spoke Polish and I never said more than thanks or "sorry, I need to make sure I didn't throw out something important." Sometimes after a day of coworkers showing how smart they were--often to each cubicle row in turn--I needed simple non-exciting conversation. Before when she left I figured she was on vacation--it was a topic of remedial conversation before--but it's been about a month now. I hope it was retirement, or promotion.
I remember staying late at work and hearing another cleaning staff person address her by her name, but I forgot that. My cubicle has one of those cheesy nametags. I doubt she remembers too many of our names now.
Anyone who can read through the first link below without feeling nauseous is much stronger than I.
The story's the furthest thing from profane--it's just proof that people wrote stupidly even 100 years ago and gives hope maybe we all haven't been getting dumber. Behold, the Arabella and Araminta stories.
I would never have found them if not for the internet--surprisingly, worldcat doesn't list them in any nearby libraries except U of C, which claims not to have a copy. I don't blame them.
The shaggy dog story for how I found these was
1. I read the Guardian top 10 book lists, noticing that the Adrian Mole series popped up a lot in people's favorites.
But I think it's a good one.
Warning warning adult joke you can maybe sort of figure from hovering over the link with proof in the HuffPo link.
Actually, I don't care about their team either way. But they ruined a cool statistical anomaly related to small sample size.
See, if they had not beaten Western Illinois so handily, then 0-1 St. Peter's would be the #1 team in the excellent Ken Pomeroy basketball ratings. Because they lost by less than the home court advantage (3.5 points) at Seton Hall, and a bunch of other things happened...
Of course, small data sizes and blah blah blah.
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