Someone put me on a list of people who write book reviews for blogs. About once a week I receive a request to read a book and write a review. If I say yes, I often get a credit at Amazon so I can download a book to my Kindle. I have learned my lesson. […]
Wanderings
Resources for Science Fiction: Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction. – Ray Bradbury
Monthly Archives: July 2012
Kid Anderson in Guitar
Saturday, July 21, 2012
This is one of the things I recorded Wednesday night at The Turning Point in Piermont. Very cool. [audio:/media/rick8.mp3]
Jane Austen’s Ring
Monday, July 16, 2012
Jane’s ring sold for 152,450 GBP or $241,467.13. Estimate was a max of 30,000 pounds, but I called it right and said it would go for as much as a quarter of million dollars. I was damn close. Sotheby's London auction house had predicted that the ring would sell for as much as $45,000, but […]
Sotheby’s History of Script
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Sotheby’s, the auction house, sold a large collection of old examples of ancient script. The History of Script: Sixty Important Manuscript Leaves from the Schøyen Collection. These include a 2,000 year old section from Iliad and many other ancient texts. An interesting one is The Adler papyri, an archive of documents in Greek and Demotic, […]
Justine asked for chicken pictures
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Chickens aren’t photogenic. It’s hard to take a good picture of a chicken.
Flesch’s Typography Rules
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Written in 1948, Rudolf Flesch’s book The Art of Readable Writing takes on some typography rules near the end. These could have been written this morning, and they apply to writing for the Web as much as they applied to writing 70 years ago. 1) Any type size under 10 point is hard to read. […]
Yes, Dammit
Monday, July 9, 2012
Rudolf Flesch wrote The Art of Readable Writing. It is a great book, which, coincidentally is very readable. It is full of examples, and today I read a great anecdote about spitting Infinities. Flesch writes: I found this last example in an article by Raymond Chandler in the March 1948 Atlantic Monthly. Since I had […]
Signs
Saturday, July 7, 2012
I made this sign out of plywood and it now hangs at the foot of the driveway. I cut some more shapes out of plywood for an Egg sign. The chickens will start laying eggs around Labor Day.