Just Kristin

Accord­ing to the Online Ety­mol­ogy Dic­tio­nary, poet­aster comes to mean poor or unskilled poet via the suf­fix –aster, which sig­ni­fies “incom­plete resem­blance”, also as in patraster, which means “he who plays the father.” Bard, the site notes, didn’t always mean “poet, singer” to every­one, at least not in a pos­i­tive sense:

“All vagabundis, fulis, bardis, scud­laris, and siclike idill pepill, sall be brint on the cheek.” [local Scot­tish ordi­nance, c.1500]

It sad­dens me to see that some peo­ple hon­estly hope to strike a major blow to the forces of racism by hold­ing a funeral for the N-word. Killing sym­bols does not kill the sym­bol­ized, and we would do well to under­stand this and act accord­ingly. Teach our chil­dren not that words are evil, but inten­tions can be. Both rocks — and the throw­ing of rocks — can be used for both harm and good, with intent mak­ing the bulk of the deci­sion. Cer­tainly there are beings so tor­mented in the past by rocks that even see­ing a rock will frighten them, but since it was not the rocks them­selves but the intent behind their wielder’s actions that gave birth to the fear, the ban­ish­ment of rocks is sim­ply the ban­ish­ment of a tool that will soon be replaced. Teach kind­ness, com­pas­sion and under­stand­ing, and even weapons will come to be used in cre­ative rather than destruc­tive ways.

The Table of Mal­con­tents has both moved and changed their link­ing strat­egy. I like their idea of a “via chain”, tho imple­ment­ing such would be quite time-consuming. I have to coax myself into a sim­ple “from” link when called for. Bad, bad blog­ger. Even more tax­o­nom­i­cally inter­est­ing is this arti­cle by the ever-fabulous Mary Beard on cre­at­ing an index for her own book. To be hon­est, I sali­vate at the very thought of an activ­ity that so mixes lit­er­a­ture and OCD.

Steve, here are two chunks of *gag* web 2.0 *gag* good­ness that I actu­ally approve of: the Thinkmap Visual The­saurus and the Visu­words™ online graph­i­cal dic­tio­nary.

This OOUP­blog piece by Ana­toly Liber­man, “There Are More Ways Than One To Be Mad”, pleased me for its humor­ous lin­guis­tic map­ping of the Eng­lish words for insan­ity. A great exam­ple of the “angry” mean­ing of the word mad, how­ever, can be seen in this video of Keith Olber­mann request­ing an imme­di­ate Bush/Cheney resignation


I am sim­ply mad for Olber­mann. Now, if our cur­rent pRes­i­dent were capa­ble of as much under­stand­ing of his coun­try as is found in this tran­scrip­tion of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, we might all be a bit hap­pier right now, and his approval rat­ing might not be quite so abysmal.

On a lighter note, any­one for a Harry Pot­ter death pool? Any ideas not found in the Salon arti­cle? Do pass them along, so I can draw up a chart and col­lect bets. Not much time to go now, right, Rachel?

If you are look­ing for other things to read, how­ever, here is Theodore Dalrymple’s list of the five best books on the crim­i­nal mind, a list on Lit­Kicks of the numer­ous nom­i­nees and one win­ner of an “America’s great­est book of all time” poll, and a fas­ci­nat­ing and well-written review of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Lastly and, in length leastly, chimps can be altru­is­tic, homun­culi are cool and hot, you can tell the cur­rent tem­per­a­ture by lis­ten­ing to crick­et­song, the sol­diers in Soviet Rus­sia really knew how to dance (the Kazatzka), old peo­ple are beau­ti­ful and knowl­edge is now down­load­able thanks to CKAN — add some of yours today!