Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed!"Anniversary Song" (Al Jolson and Saul Chaplin)
We vowed our true love, though a word wasn't said.
The world was in bloom, there were stars in the skies,
Except for the few that were there in your eyes.
I added some thoughts this morning to what's become the most visited page on my blog.
LINK: "How to e-mail a professor"
From BBC News:
An amateur British archaeologist says he has located Ithaca, the homeland of Homer's legendary hero Odysseus.My immediate impulse is to say, It's a story. But Bittlestone and his co-authors have a book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Robert Bittlestone and two experts say research shows the rocky island in The Odyssey was in the western part of Greek tourist destination Cephalonia.
Satellite imagery was used to match the landscape with descriptions in Homer's poem about the return of the man behind the wooden horse of Troy.
This picture is me--I mean, I. (I graded eighteen papers in three hours last night and this morning.)
[Photo taken on an Amtrak train leaving Chicago.]
Various bits of advice from MetaFilter. I especially like the suggestion to use cds as units of studying time (study through one cd, then take a short break, then another cd, and so on).
LINK: "Being productive in college"
[Via 43 Folders.]
acceptableFrom a list of "the 100 words most often misspelled," complete with explanations of why they're easy to misspell. An enterprising person could format these words into columns, print a page (or index card), and save many trips to the dictionary.
accidentally
accommodate
acquit
a lot
amateur
apparent
argument
I spent some time this weekend rewriting and streamlining a January 2005 post that's had a fair number of hits, "How to e-mail a professor." It's worthwhile reading for any college student.
LINK: "How to e-mail a professor"
The weaknesses of Microsoft Word's grammar checker are by now well known, via Sandeep Krishnamurthy's eye-opening demonstration. And the inherent weaknesses of any spellchecker should be obvious: the inability to distinguish between their and there, for instance, or to know that proof read should be written as proofread. Yesterday I found a further glitch when reading over a document: Word's spellchecker didn't flag the typo ands.
According to the online Oxford English Dictionary, ands is a word, at least sort of. AND, always in all caps, is a transitive verb, meaning "to combine (sets, binary signals, etc.) using a Boolean AND operator." Sample OED sentence: "The program for plot ANDs X with 7." It's also conceivable that someone might pluralize the conjunction: "This sentence uses too many ands." But wouldn't it make better sense to omit ands from Word's standard dictionary and allow users of Boolean operators to add the word to a custom dictionary? Just asking.
As my wife Elaine Fine has pointed out to me, Word's spellchecker also recognizes Julliard as correct. But the music school is Juilliard. The spellcheckers in both AbiWord and the Writer component of OpenOffice.org let ands go by, but they both flag Julliard as misspelled. Both programs are freeware, which in this case means that you get what you don't pay for--greater accuracy in spelling.
From Raymond Carver's essay "On Writing":
Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I'll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now. "Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing." Ezra Pound. It is not everything by any means, but if a writer has "fundamental accuracy of statement" going for him, he's at least on the right track.LINK: "On Writing"
I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekhov: ". . . and suddenly everything became clear to him." I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that's implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What's happened? Most of all--what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief--and anticipation.
I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say "No cheap tricks" to a group of writing students. That should go on a three-by-five card. I'd amend it a little to "No tricks." Period. I hate tricks.
Listening to the radio during lunch, I thought that I heard these words:
The Tao is up four points.Nope, it's the Dow that's up. I am sadly out of "the mainstream."
