Appetizing

Appetizing: adjective, or noun? Discuss.

Sunny intervals

That’s BBC weather.

American weatherpersons often speak of “intervals of sun.” “Sunny intervals” sounds brighter and more cheerful. I’d like sunny intervals, soon.

MLK

[Photograph by Paul Schutzerby, May 17, 1957, Washington, D.C. From the Life photo archive.]

On 17 May 1957, nearly 25,000 demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for a Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, featuring three hours of spirituals, songs, and speeches that urged the federal government to fulfill the three-year-old Brown v. Board of Education decision. The last speech of the day was reserved for Martin Luther King’s “Give Us the Ballot” oration, which captured public attention and placed him in the national spotlight as a major leader of the civil rights movement.

Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom (King Institute)

Blogger spacing problem solved

If you dislike Blogger’s odd spacing before and after block quotations, here’s a fix.

Look in your Blogger template for “.post {”:

.post {
  margin:.5em 0 1.5em;
  border-bottom:1px dotted $bordercolor;
  padding-bottom:1.5em;
  line-height:1.6em;
  }

Note the line-height. Now look for “.post blockquote {”:

.post blockquote {
  margin:1.6em 20px;
  }

Change the em number to match the line-height you found above, as I’ve done here. That’s it.

[Usual disclaimers apply: tinker at your own risk.]

In Julia Child’s kitchen

Watching The French Chef on DVD last night, Elaine and I had the same thought: that Julia Child’s kitchen is in our kitchen. Look:

My Kitchen, Julia Child’s Kitchen (Musical Assumptions)

See? The oven is not exactly our old one though (pace Elaine). Look here.

Churchill’s speeches fail exam

News from England, late 2009:

Churchill’s speeches, Hemingway’s style and Golding’s prose would not have been appreciated by a new computerised marking system used to assess A level English.

The system, which is a proposed way of marking exam papers online, found that Churchill’s rousing call to "fight them on the beaches" was too repetitive, with the text using the word “upon” and “our” too frequently. . . .

Online marking of papers is being tested by exam boards and could be introduced within the next few years. It is already in use in America, where some children have learnt to write in a style which the computer appreciates, known as “schmoozing the computer.”

Churchill’s speeches fail exam (Telegraph)

Schmoozing the teacher, sure, but I’ve not heard of schmoozing the computer. A Google search points again and again to this Telegraph article. I’d like to know what’s involved in computer-schmoozing.

Related posts, on the SAT essay test
The SAT is broken
Words, words, words

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From a commercial for the United States, in a dream earlier this morning.

Stand with Haiti

Talking with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC last night, Tracy Kidder recommended Partners in Health to anyone interested in donating money to help Haiti. Kidder is the author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, about PIH co-founder Paul Farmer.

William Zinsser, writing advice

William Zinsser offers writing advice to international students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism:

Writing English as a Second Language (The American Scholar)

Useful for all students of writing.

Huffington Post, misleading headline

Above, the main headline at the Huffington Post right now (where it appears at about twice the size). Reading it, you would click, without even thinking, anticipating the news of a catastrophic aftershock. And you would not find it. What you would find is a report on the earthquake’s aftermath.

The Huffington Post is notorious, in my house anyway, for its cynical efforts to increase page views. Click on a headline to read a story; get a page with that headline, no story; click again. It’s difficult to decide whether the above headline is a matter of an ill-considered metaphor or the work of the Department of Page Views. At any rate, it helps to explain why I’ve begun to get the news from the BBC.

[Ben, you were right.]