IE 7

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7. Here's a link worth clicking on before using the program:

http://www.ie7.com

Jokes aside, Firefox is a far better browser.

Firefox 1.5, free download

Introducing Rickey Antipasto

I sometimes amuse myself by pondering the odd names attached to the day's spam mails. (I'm easily amused.) I've even made imaginary lives for some of these "people." But today I received a spam mail from a "writer" for whom I can imagine no real-world existence. I find it easy though to imagine him as a character on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Yes, his name is Rickey Antipasto.

I can hear the voice of William Conrad (the Rocky and Bullwinkle announcer) so clearly: "But for Rickey Antipasto and our friends, time was running out!"

The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (Wikipedia)

Related posts
The folks who live in the mail
The poetry of spam

Proofread car fully!

The appearance of any work by J. Harris Miller is a major event in literary and cultural studies.

Blurb from the back cover of Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James, by J. Hillis Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005)

Hurricane

For my students (or anyone reading Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God), here are some links concerning the hurricane of 1928. One excerpt, from "The Florida Flood":

In 1928, thousands stayed in the interior. People asked many times, "Why didn’t they flee?" Now people are asking the same questions about New Orleans. The answer in both cases is the same. For many people, fleeing just wasn’t an option.

As in Katrina, many of the victims were poor -– in this case, poor migrant workers. While Katrina’s targets had the option of an Interstate highway system, those along Lake Okeechobee had the option of following a winding 2-lane road north or taking the road to the coast – the last place anyone would want to go with a hurricane bearing down. And the vast majority didn’t have access to a car, much less own one.

The Florida Flood (History News Network)

Florida's forgotten storm: The hurricane of 1928 (Sun-Sentinel) 2003 recollections from survivors of the storm

The night 2,000 died (Sun-Sentinel)

A storm of memories (St. Petersburg Times) A 1992 interview with a survivor of the storm

Water World (New Republic) Review of Eliot Kleinberg's Black Cloud: The Great Florida Hurricane of 1928 and Robert Mykle's Killer 'Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928

Drawing-room

Reading Proust has made me wonder: what does drawing-room mean? Could the word have originally referred to a room in which accomplished young ladies worked on their sketching? Alas, no. Here's a charmingly quaint definition from the Oxford English Dictionary of the word's meanings then and "now":

1. a. orig. A room to withdraw to, a private chamber attached to a more public room . . . ; now, a room reserved for the reception of company, and to which the ladies withdraw from the dining-room after dinner.

The OED records the word's first appearance in 1642, as a shortening of withdrawing-room, which itself goes back to 1591. The even older withdrawing-chamber dates to 1392.

So I began to wonder about withdraw, which suddenly looked rather odd. Why does it mean what it does? The explanation is found in the word retire, which comes into English from the French retirer, "to withdraw," from re- and tirer, "to draw, to pull; to take out, to extract" (Cassell's French-English Dictionary). So to withdraw is to retire.

I shall now retire to the drawing-room.

Oops, it's ladies only.

Proust: "that supernatural instrument"

Proust's similes are always a delight:

And I went downstairs, hardly stopping to think how extraordinary it was that I should be going to see the mysterious Mme de Guermantes of my childhood, simply to use her as a source of practical information, as one uses the telephone, that supernatural instrument before whose wonders we were once all in awe, and which we now use unthinkingly, to call our tailor or order an iced dessert.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 24

Proust posts, via Pinboard

Hardy Mums

My dad's a master in small spaces. This punning collage arrived in the mail today. In real life it measures 1 7/16 inches by 3 1/4 inches.

[Pen and ink illustration and colored pencil, by James Leddy.]

_L

Orange Crate Art just had its fifty-thousandth visitor. I'm teaching the Aeneid on Wednesday, so I'm marking the visit with a Roman numeral. The bar above the numeral indicates multiplication by 1,000 -- a lot simpler than 50 Ms.

The fifty-thousandth visitor was from Redmond, Washington, from some company called Microsoft, going to my post Cool laptop via a link at Lifehacker.

Overheard

"You're the only person I know who could be frightened by a radish."

"Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Achilles and stochastic

How could I not look at the text of a spam message titled "Achilles and stochastic"? A small excerpt:

Ten years ago a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. But when I end up in the hay it's only hay, hey hey. Round, all around the world. Maybe tomorrow, I'll want to settle down, until tomorrow, I'll just keep moving on. 80 days around the world, we'll find a pot of gold just sitting where the rainbow's ending. Ulysses, Ulysses -- fighting evil and tyranny, with all his power, and with all of his might. He's got style, a groovy style, and a car that just won't stop. In search of Earth, flying in to the night. Thunder, thunder, thundercats, Ho! Thundercats are on the move, Thundercats are loose. Top Cat! The indisputable leader of the gang. He's the boss, he's a pip, he's the championship.

Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune.

And now it's back to reality (grading).

stochastic (Merriam-Webster OnLine)