Trivial Pursuits
Warning: Harmful Content
Monday the Eighth of February, Twenty Ten
Incidentally, I've just read the funniest sentence in the whole series.
Hang on—is it just me, or is Ireland not independant in the Potterverse? There's no Irish Minister of Magic in the Top Box at the Quidditch World Cup and Cornelius Fudge presents the Cup to the Irish team. But even more damningly, the headquarters of the British and Irish Quidditch Leagues are clearly stated to be in the Ministry of Magic in London! What's the deal, J.K.?
Although, when you think about it, this may not be what I'm thinking. What if magical!Ireland became independant of magical!Britain long before 1922—or was never subjugated by British wizardry at all—and this apparent union was a peaceful and voluntary one, like the European Union? Really, you would think there would be more of a postnationalist movement in the wizarding world than in the Muggle world, given that wizards are a small global subculture that exists in isolation from the Muggle world. After all, bigotry in the Potterverse seems to be mostly limited to anti-Muggle and anti-part-human/non-human sentiment (with a few exceptions, like a crack on Angelina's hair). But you don't really see that in the books. Of course, the impetus for the peaceful union of Europe (an completely unprecedented event in human history) was World War II, and although the rise of Grindelwald was going on at around the same time, one doesn't get the sense that it brought magical!Europe to its knees like the first half of the twentieth century did to Muggle Europe.
(Hang on—what happened to the wizards who were drafted in WWII, and all the other various Muggle wars? Did they just dodge the draft? Or did the Ministry pull strings? Man, can you imagine Winston Churchill being told that the hundreds of incredibly powerful magic-users in Britain were just sitting this one out? I guess the Minister at the time might have been able to convince him with the argument that if British wizards joined in, German ones would too, and it would be Muggle communities that suffered. Though I can't believe that Hitler—who was, after all, a big fan of the occult—would have accepted that argument, especially as the war was coming to its end and he was willing to do anything to prevent defeat.)
furtively posted by Martin Marks at 12:52 at night // twenty-two comments by:
Saturday the Sixth of February, Twenty Ten
A stolen poem for a snowed-in day:
There are many things in the world and you
Are one of them. Many things keep happening and
You are one of them, and the happening that
Is you keeps falling like snow
On the landscape of not-you, hiding hideousness, until
The streets and the world of wrath are choked with snow.
How many things have become silent? Traffic
Is throttled. The mayor
Has been, clearly, remiss, and the city
Was totally unprepared for such a crisis. Nor
was I — yes, why should this happen to me?
I have always been a law-abiding citizen.
But you, like snow, like love, keep falling.
And it is not certain that the world will not be
Covered in a glitter of crystalline whiteness.
Silence.
—Robert Penn Warren, "Love Recognized"
piquantly posted by Martin Marks at 3:49 in the afternoon // four comments by:
Saturday the Thirtieth of January, Twenty Ten
Am I Martin who dreamt of Mark Twain with flipper-wings, or Mark Twain with flipper-wings dreaming he is Martin?
Last night I dreamed I was in Russia. Mostly uninteresting except for the fact that when I went to sleep in the dream, I woke up. A very Zhuangzi moment.
There was another, much more intricate dream. A land populated by beings with one flipper or wing or something. A despot who ruled the land by controlling access to a portal to a dimension of books, where all knowledge came from. Five beings born without flipper-wings, each with their own power: one (who may have been Mark Twain) was immortal, one could find any book... damn, I can't remember the others, but they were trying to gain access to the portal and overthrow the despot. But the despot had found five beings born with two flipper-wings, who had powers that opposed the flipper-wing-less heroes: one was capable of killing the immortal, one could hide things from the finder, and so on. Why do I have so many Standard Fantasy Quest Dreams?
obliquely posted by Martin Marks at 1:14 in the afternoon // comment? by:
Monday the Twenty-Fifth of January, Twenty Ten
The Beatles = Benny Goodman?
If I have kids in the next decade—which is the general plan, though a few minor details, most notably the identity of their mother, have yet to be ironed out—then they will view music from the aughts the way I view music from the seventies.
obliquely posted by Martin Marks at 2:18 in the afternoon // one comment by:
Saturday the Twenty-Third of January, Twenty Ten
His blog is called "Great Books, Half Read"!
Okay, that's just disturbing.
adventurously posted by Martin Marks at 11:05 at night // nine comments by:
And ODF is XML-based!
I wish word processors worked like HTML/CSS. I prefer to write in a print-like format, with text in a proportional font and emphasis indicated in italics. But a final manuscript should (by silly industry convention) be in typewriter-like format, with text in a monospaced font and emphasis indicated with underlines. Now, it's easy to tell OpenOffice to change the "text body" font style (and line spacing, and indentation, and all of that stuff), but why is there no way to tell it to change how emphasis is indicated?
Okay, twelve seconds of research indicates that you can in fact use the extended options in "Find and Replace" to select all italicized text, but that's not the point, now is it? It just makes sense to have a style-dependent "emphasis" and "strong" mode. If I wrote in HTML with a CSS stylesheet, I could restyle the whole thing in seconds without altering the text. Why can't you do that in a word processor?
pretentiously posted by Martin Marks at 10:25 in the evening // six comments by:
Friday the Twenty-Second of January, Twenty Ten
None of the results are rappers.
At a cursory glance, it looks like just about all the results on a Google for "morpheme drip" (and there are only twenty results) are people who don't know how to spell morphine. I count three results—two comment threads and a blog with a single entry—that appear to be at least half-heartedly making what seems to me to be an incredibly obvious pun.
heartily posted by Martin Marks at 6:13 in the evening // comment? by:
Wednesday the Twentieth of January, Twenty Ten
Neither of the people voted "most likely to succeed" has left any web impression whatsoever.
I never used to take out my high school yearbooks before Facebook. Maybe because this year will actually be ten years. I wonder if they'll be able to find me to send an invite for the reunion. I've always said that I wouldn't go to a high school reunion until I can arrive in a helicopter with an entourage of at least three, but if I actually sell Trogs, that'd be worth rubbing in one or two faces at the least.
Anyway, I guess I really have nothing better to do tonight than read the comments people wrote in my yearbooks, and I have to say, none of them can possibly beat this freshman year gem from someone who was in my class (and barely knew): Martin,
What can I
say—It's been
"Interesting" to
say the least—work
on responsibility
- Craig L— Thank you, Craig. Your completely un-asked-for advice is as relevant now as it always was. Although judging from a quick Pipl search, it seems you've loosened up over the years and are happier for it. Good for you.
One of these days, I'm going to do a detailed statistical analysis of my senior year's class portraits, finally settling such crucial questions as "exactly what percentage of my classmates quoted the Dave Matthews Band?" and "damn, did any males in my class NOT have a caesar with frosted tips?"
enigmatically posted by Martin Marks at 10:04 in the evening // comment? by:
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