Great Taxes
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tax Returns, published at The American Scholar:
And though we have saved nothing, we have danced the carmagnole…
I suppose that’s one way to look at it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tax Returns, published at The American Scholar:
And though we have saved nothing, we have danced the carmagnole…
I suppose that’s one way to look at it.
The public archives of tumbledry go back to my embarrassingly rudimentary scrawling in October, 1999. By that calendar, we’ll turn 10 in October of this year. However, I only registered the domain tumbledry.org on July 22, 2003. At the time, I was smack in the middle of leaving high school times for college life. My intensely narrow understanding of the world around me expanded agonizingly slowly; however, something during that time made me think it would be a good idea to hop on the evolving internet and get a proper website going. Before that, this space was called “Alex’s Website.” I’ve some mortifying splash pages from that era. Perhaps I’ll share those if I get time. Before that, dating to sometime around the beginning of 1999, I put together a site called TI Chip. It was mostly an archive of 1200+ calculator programs. I loved piecing together websites on Angelfire and Tripod, two free hosting sites of the day.
The English language has the word happenstance, which is a chance happening or event. I propose a modified version of this word as an addition to the language. When something bad happens, it’s crappenstance.
Impress your friends, etc.
Designers Toolbox: Proof Reading Marks. Many of these are obsolete in this era of computers, but I still use the marks for delete, new paragraph, comma insertion, transpose, and change to lowercase.
Slashdot has an article titled The Real Mother of All Bombs, 46 Years Ago; inevitably, the discussion turned to Cold War politics. I found this comment to be particularly interesting:
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Welcome to Dooce, everything I wish tumbledry to be - Her most recent post:
The only thing missing was a Google map of our house and a red pin sticking straight up out of Jon’s skull to signal HERE, HERE, HERE …
As the human body ages, certain immune system organs actually shrink. For example, there’s the thymus: here, T cells (one of the primary components of the immune system’s ability to recognize and eliminate foreign antigen) are converted from naïve to mature. If you look at a picture of the thymus of a teen next to one of an 80 year old, the difference is striking. It’s not like the color and texture difference between a cancerous lung and a normal lung—there’s actually hardly any thymus left in the 80 year old’s picture. Why the geriatric thymus continues to function effectively is the topic of another post. But the fact remains: there’s a definite change in the immune system with the passage of time.
I’ve been reading more and more of The New Yorker lately, so I’ve been seeing a lot of their famous one panel comics that have been in their pages for years. These cartoons are selected quite carefully, as shown in a recent article about the cartoon editor of the New Yorker; from what I can tell, the cartoons are selected to be subtle, clever, and not laugh out-loud funny. They are therefore things you can glance at more than once and find entertainment.
One of the biggest obstacles preventing me from writing very much in the past couple of months has been worrying about dental school: specifically, whether or not I have gotten in. I’ve been hesitant to write anything at all about it until I knew one way or the other; it’s awfully difficult to think about, much less write coherent thoughts concerning my hopes, dreams, and fears. Come to think of it, avoiding the cathartic effect of writing may have been a mistake. There are many stories to tell that have happened along the way … but they will fit best when there is some sort of conclusion. Then again, I don’t know if I really want to look back at the journal of my life and read about all this worrying I’ve done. Either way, the silence has been getting to be too much, so I think I’ll pick up on the writing thing again.
I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.
— Jack Kerouac
I was going to write a post about how I thought the headline “orange juice futures looking promising” from the Wall Street Journal was funny … but the paper has since gone out for recycling; and when I think about it (like many posts), it really was not the greatest idea. That said, there were a couple of other things that made me laugh the past couple of days. If I could only remember one …
The Nine Billion Names of God - God, Faith, Monks. Great short story writing by Arthur Clarke.
Love Can Take It - The lovely Mykala blogs about her college life. You’ll come for the humor and stay for the snappy writing that powers it.
Plus, she’s my girlfriend so … enjoy the website already!
Salon - One of the best online magazines in existence. Imagine crossing The New Yorker with Slate, and now you’re talking.
In honor of his recently released book, A Man Without a Country, I thought I would point out a couple of Kurt Vonnegut-type-things today. First, I can not write nearly well enough to do his tremendous writing justice. So, below I will reproduce one of my favorite short stories by him in full. This is likely not legal. However, while I breach copyright in this way, I will point you to buy one of his books or this book, also by him or visit his website. Hopefully that will save me from the/some lawyers.
We are approaching the beginning of another school year, and to all of you out there, I would like to impress something upon all the students out there: get your “to” right. Seriously.
If there is one aspect of the English language you can master (beyond spelling and basic grammar) please please get the difference between ‘to’ and ‘too.’ Take the correct usage in a recent email from St. Thomas public safety:
I ran across some interesting things whilst perusing the Sunday paper today. First of all, the color TV has turned 50 and an article celebrating the joys of color was written to mark the momentous occasion. So Americans watch, on average, 70 days per year of TV. That’s all well and good - la dee dah. But, what about this quote from the grandma who wants to keep her grandchild occupied in the car: