"Asked for an explanation of her brother’s collecting habit, Ms. Honig said she didn’t have one. 'It just started with that Mickey Mouse lamp in Buffalo, and it got out of control,' she said."
- NYT, obituary of Lester Glassner, 9/21/2009, a "collector of pop cultural artifacts."
"In a wood older than record, a foster brother of the hills, stood the village of Allathurion; and there was peace between the people of that village and all the folk who walked in the dark ways of the wood, whether they were human or of the tribes of the beasts or of the race of the fairies and the elves and the little sacred spirits of trees and streams. Moreover, the village people had peace among themselves and between them and their lord, Lorendiac. In front of the village was a wide and grassy space, and beyond this the great wood again, but at the back the trees came right up to the houses, which, with their great beams and wooden framework and thatched roofs, green with moss, seemed almost to be a part of the forest." -Lord Dunsany, The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth
"The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world's rim; and strange winds, blowing from a pit no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark, orblike mountains which rise from its wrinkled and pitted plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids half-buried in that abysmal sand. Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.' -Clark Ashton Smith, The Abominations of Yondo
Bugs Bunny: "Hey, I bet that was a... Say, do you think that was a... Hey, could that have been a... gremlin?" The Gremlin: [screaming in Bugs' ear] "It ain't Vendell Villkie!"
From "Falling Hare," directed by Bob Clampett, released October 30, 1943,
"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.” - Harry Lime, The Third Man
"To accuse his fate and to rail against it, is man's dubious prerogative. Few would be willing to deny it to themselves but it is not attractive in others. And that, certainly, is one of the reasons why the fellowship with animals who, for the most part, will not compete with us in lamentations, is so agreeable." -- Joseph Wood Krutch, The Twelve Seasons: A Perpetual Calendar for the Country
"Until lately the place where the Old Balto-Slavonic branched off from the other Indo-European languages and the place of origin of the Slavs were matters of dispute. But in 1908 the Polish botanist Rostafiński put forward from botanical geography evidence from which we can fix the original home of the Balto-Slavs (and consequently that of the Germans too, for the Balts could only have originated in immediate proximity to the Germans). The Balto-Slavs have no expressions for beech (fagus sylvatica), larch (larix europaea), and yew (taxus baccata), but they have a word for hornbeam (carpinus betulus). Therefore their original home must have been within the hornbeam zone but outside of the three other tree-zones, that is within the basin of the middle Dnieper (v. map). Hence Polesie—the marshland traversed by the Pripet, but not south or east of Kiev—must be the original home of the Slavs. The North Europeans (ancestors of the Kelts, Germans, and Balto-Slavs) originally had names for beech and yew, and therefore lived north of the Carpathians and west of a line between Konigsberg and Odessai. The ancestors of the Balto-Slavs crossed the beech and yew zone and made their way into Polesie; they then lost the word for beech, while they transferred the word for yew to the sallow (Slav. iva, salix caprea) and the black alder (Lithuan. yeva, rhamnus frangula), both of which have red wood."
- T. Peisker, in The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. II (New York: Macmillan, 1913), chap. XIV (The Expansion of the Slavs), p. 418
"An ergative–absolutive language (or simply an ergative language) is a language that treats the argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb like the object of a transitive verb, but distinctly from the agent ("subject")of a transitive verb."
"That sign language was abused is not in doubt. It is not difficult to create new signs for new circumstances, and the various proscriptions issued at various times by the General Chapter make it abundantly clear that sign language was also being used for joking and idle conversation. The repetition of these proscriptions would also seem to indicate that the views of the General Chapter were not always heeded."
--Terryl N. Kinder, Cistercian Europe: Architecture of Contemplation, p. 59
"Much of Irish history and a great deal of Irish drama appear to have been cleverly constructed to substantiate the least plausible fancies of Sigmund Freud." - Kevin D. Williamson, "Luck of the Irish" (theater column), The New Criterion, October, 2009
"The grammar of Latin, like that of other ancient Indo-European languages, is highly inflected, which allows for a large degree of flexibility when choosing word order. In Latin, there are five declensions of nouns and four conjugations of verbs. Latin does not have articles and so does not generally differentiate between, for example, a girl and the girl; the same syntactic unit represents both: puella amat means both a girl loves and the girl loves. Word order generally follows the Subject Object Verb paradigm, although variations on this are especially common in poetry and express subtle nuances in prose. Latin is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually places adjectives after nouns. The language can also omit pronouns in certain situations, meaning that grammatical gender, person, and number alone can generally identify the agent; pronouns are most often reserved for situations where meaning is not entirely clear. Latin exhibits verb-framing, in which the manner and path of motion are encoded into the verb itself; e.g. 'exit' literally means "he/she/it goes out"; while English, however, relies on prepositions to encode the same information." - Latin Grammar, Wikipedia
"My expectations were high, and I sat down to watch a show that proved smart, inventive and enjoyable, but for one key detail: ZOMBIES DON'T RUN!"
"I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies do not run. It's a misconception, a bastardisation that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I'll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It's hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all."
"I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious fashion. It was my fortune to have access to his Nameless Cults in the original edition, the so-called Black Book, published in Dusseldorf in 1839, shortly before a hounding doom overtook the author. Collectors of rare literature are familiar with Nameless Cults mainly through the cheap and faulty translation which was pirated in London by Bridewall in 1845, and the carefully expurgated edition put out by the Golden Goblin Press of New York in 1909. But the volume I stumbled upon was one of the unexpurgated German copies, with heavy leather covers and rusty iron hasps. I doubt if there are more than half a dozen such volumes in the entire world today, for the quantity issued was not great, and when the manner of the author's demise was bruited about, many possessors of the book burned their volumes in panic." -Robert E. Howard, The Black Stone
"My own conservatism is one of temperament: I get a kick out of tradition and am usually made edgy by too-rapid change. I don't go as far here as Evelyn Waugh, another conservative of temperament. Waugh once claimed that he was not going to vote Tory because the party had been in office for eight years and hadn't set back the clock a single minute." - Joseph Epstein
Remember, remember the Fifth of November, The Gunpowder Treason and Plot, I know of no reason Why the Gunpowder Treason Should ever be forgot. Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent To blow up the King and Parli'ment. Three-score barrels of powder below To prove old England's overthrow; By God's providence he was catch'd With a dark lantern and burning match. Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring. Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King! And what should we do with him? Burn him!
"A peerage generally falls dormant in circumstances when a peer dies and, although it is believed that there may be heirs to the title in existence, (a) their whereabouts may not be known, or (b) there is insufficient documentary evidence for an heir to prove that he is in fact the next heir of line to the late peer. Obviously the more time that elapses, the more difficult it becomes for someone to successfully claim a dormant title. However, in 1985 Patrick Hope-Johnstone successfully petitioned the Committee of Privileges of the House of Lords to be recognised as Earl of Annandale and Hartfell, a title that had been dormant since 1792. An as yet unfinished story concerns the Scottish earldom of Breadalbane, which became dormant in 1995 when the 10th earl died childless. It was thought that the next heir of line would stem from a remote kinsman, John Breadalbane Campbell, who died in Florida, USA, in 1918, but whose descendants (if any) were completely unknown to Debrett's and to the other peerage reference books. A keen amateur genealogist, however, made a study of this man, and not only discovered that he had lived for a time in Budapest, but also traced the documentary evidence to prove that he had a great grandson alive and well in Hungary, making a living as a taxi-driver. Although the legal costs may be formidable, it would seem that Huba Andras Campbell would have a very good chance of proving his claim to be 11th Earl of Breadalbane, and he is thought to have expressed an interest in doing so." -Debrett's
20 comments:
"Asked for an explanation of her brother’s collecting habit, Ms. Honig said she didn’t have one. 'It just started with that Mickey Mouse lamp in Buffalo, and it got out of control,' she said."
- NYT, obituary of Lester Glassner, 9/21/2009, a "collector of pop cultural artifacts."
Mr. Wilkins roxx!!!! He's the best teacher everrr!!... :D
"In a wood older than record, a foster brother of the hills, stood the village of Allathurion; and there was peace between the people of that village and all the folk who walked in the dark ways of the wood, whether they were human or of the tribes of the beasts or of the race of the fairies and the elves and the little sacred spirits of trees and streams. Moreover, the village people had peace among themselves and between them and their lord, Lorendiac. In front of the village was a wide and grassy space, and beyond this the great wood again, but at the back the trees came right up to the houses, which, with their great beams and wooden framework and thatched roofs, green with moss, seemed almost to be a part of the forest."
-Lord Dunsany, The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth
"The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world's rim; and strange winds, blowing from a pit no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark, orblike mountains which rise from its wrinkled and pitted plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids half-buried in that abysmal sand. Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.'
-Clark Ashton Smith, The Abominations of Yondo
"Exemplum de simia, quae, quanto plus ascendit, tanto plus apparent posteriora eius." - S. Bonaventura
Bugs Bunny: "Hey, I bet that was a... Say, do you think that was a... Hey, could that have been a... gremlin?"
The Gremlin: [screaming in Bugs' ear] "It ain't Vendell Villkie!"
From "Falling Hare," directed by Bob Clampett, released October 30, 1943,
I that in heill wes and gladnes,
Am trublit now with gret seiknes,
And feblit with infermite;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Our plesance heir is all vane glory,
This fals warld is bot transitory,
The flesche is brukle,the Fend is sle;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
- William Dunbar, Lament for the
Makeris (verses 1 & 2)
"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”
- Harry Lime, The Third Man
"To accuse his fate and to rail against it, is man's dubious prerogative. Few would be willing to deny it to themselves but it is not attractive in others. And that, certainly, is one of the reasons why the fellowship with animals who, for the most part, will not compete with us in lamentations, is so agreeable." -- Joseph Wood Krutch, The Twelve Seasons: A Perpetual Calendar for the Country
"Until lately the place where the Old Balto-Slavonic branched off from the other Indo-European languages and the place of origin of the Slavs were matters of dispute. But in 1908 the Polish botanist Rostafiński put forward from botanical geography evidence from which we can fix the original home of the Balto-Slavs (and consequently that of the Germans too, for the Balts could only have originated in immediate proximity to the Germans). The Balto-Slavs have no expressions for beech (fagus sylvatica), larch (larix europaea), and yew (taxus baccata), but they have a word for hornbeam (carpinus betulus). Therefore their original home must have been within the hornbeam zone but outside of the three other tree-zones, that is within the basin of the middle Dnieper (v. map). Hence Polesie—the marshland traversed by the Pripet, but not south or east of Kiev—must be the original home of the Slavs. The North Europeans (ancestors of the Kelts, Germans, and Balto-Slavs) originally had names for beech and yew, and therefore lived north of the Carpathians and west of a line between Konigsberg and Odessai. The ancestors of the Balto-Slavs crossed the beech and yew zone and made their way into Polesie; they then lost the word for beech, while they transferred the word for yew to the sallow (Slav. iva, salix caprea) and the black alder (Lithuan. yeva, rhamnus frangula), both of which have red wood."
- T. Peisker, in The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. II (New York: Macmillan, 1913), chap. XIV (The Expansion of the Slavs), p. 418
"An ergative–absolutive language (or simply an ergative language) is a language that treats the argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb like the object of a transitive verb, but distinctly from the agent ("subject")of a transitive verb."
-Wikipedia, "Ergative–absolutive language"
"That sign language was abused is not in doubt. It is not difficult to create new signs for new circumstances, and the various proscriptions issued at various times by the General Chapter make it abundantly clear that sign language was also being used for joking and idle conversation. The repetition of these proscriptions would also seem to indicate that the views of the General Chapter were not always heeded."
--Terryl N. Kinder, Cistercian Europe: Architecture of Contemplation, p. 59
"Much of Irish history and a great deal of Irish drama appear to have been cleverly constructed to substantiate the least plausible fancies of Sigmund Freud."
- Kevin D. Williamson, "Luck of the Irish" (theater column), The New Criterion, October, 2009
"The grammar of Latin, like that of other ancient Indo-European languages, is highly inflected, which allows for a large degree of flexibility when choosing word order. In Latin, there are five declensions of nouns and four conjugations of verbs. Latin does not have articles and so does not generally differentiate between, for example, a girl and the girl; the same syntactic unit represents both: puella amat means both a girl loves and the girl loves. Word order generally follows the Subject Object Verb paradigm, although variations on this are especially common in poetry and express subtle nuances in prose. Latin is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually places adjectives after nouns. The language can also omit pronouns in certain situations, meaning that grammatical gender, person, and number alone can generally identify the agent; pronouns are most often reserved for situations where meaning is not entirely clear. Latin exhibits verb-framing, in which the manner and path of motion are encoded into the verb itself; e.g. 'exit' literally means "he/she/it goes out"; while English, however, relies on prepositions to encode the same information."
- Latin Grammar, Wikipedia
"My expectations were high, and I sat down to watch a show that proved smart, inventive and enjoyable, but for one key detail: ZOMBIES DON'T RUN!"
"I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies do not run. It's a misconception, a bastardisation that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I'll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It's hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all."
-- Simon Pegg, The Guardian 4 November 2008
"I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious fashion. It was my fortune to have access to his Nameless Cults in the original edition, the so-called Black Book, published in Dusseldorf in 1839, shortly before a hounding doom overtook the author. Collectors of rare literature are familiar with Nameless Cults mainly through the cheap and faulty translation which was pirated in London by Bridewall in 1845, and the carefully expurgated edition put out by the Golden Goblin Press of New York in 1909. But the volume I stumbled upon was one of the unexpurgated German copies, with heavy leather covers and rusty iron hasps. I doubt if there are more than half a dozen such volumes in the entire world today, for the quantity issued was not great, and when the manner of the author's demise was bruited about, many possessors of the book burned their volumes in panic."
-Robert E. Howard, The Black Stone
"My own conservatism is one of temperament: I get a kick out of tradition and am usually made edgy by too-rapid change. I don't go as far here as Evelyn Waugh, another conservative of temperament. Waugh once claimed that he was not going to vote Tory because the party had been in office for eight years and hadn't set back the clock a single minute." - Joseph Epstein
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent
To blow up the King and Parli'ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England's overthrow;
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
And what should we do with him? Burn him!
"People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors."
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
"A peerage generally falls dormant in circumstances when a peer dies and, although it is believed that there may be heirs to the title in existence, (a) their whereabouts may not be known, or (b) there is insufficient documentary evidence for an heir to prove that he is in fact the next heir of line to the late peer. Obviously the more time that elapses, the more difficult it becomes for someone to successfully claim a dormant title.
However, in 1985 Patrick Hope-Johnstone successfully petitioned the Committee of Privileges of the House of Lords to be recognised as Earl of Annandale and Hartfell, a title that had been dormant since 1792.
An as yet unfinished story concerns the Scottish earldom of Breadalbane, which became dormant in 1995 when the 10th earl died childless. It was thought that the next heir of line would stem from a remote kinsman, John Breadalbane Campbell, who died in Florida, USA, in 1918, but whose descendants (if any) were completely unknown to Debrett's and to the other peerage reference books.
A keen amateur genealogist, however, made a study of this man, and not only discovered that he had lived for a time in Budapest, but also traced the documentary evidence to prove that he had a great grandson alive and well in Hungary, making a living as a taxi-driver. Although the legal costs may be formidable, it would seem that Huba Andras Campbell would have a very good chance of proving his claim to be 11th Earl of Breadalbane, and he is thought to have expressed an interest in doing so." -Debrett's
Post a Comment