Whatever happens to strike my fancy, but surely some sort of fiber content.
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| Like The Queen Whatever happens to strike my fancy, but surely some sort of fiber content. |
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2 Comments:You, tease -- offering us photos and then withholding them! A pox upon ye! ;-) yes, dear, definitely laughing with you! LOL Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom] Monday, July 02, 2007 Yesterday, as I puttered around the house, all sorts of life’s oddities and absurdities, its contradictions and its surprises, flitted through my mind, each one of them a worthy topic for a blog post, or even just a meander down the path to conclusion. Alas, creature of habit that I am, I never stopped to write any of those quirky thoughts down, not even any little mnemonic notes, and so I am left this morning with nothing to write about beyond a catalog, with photos, of yarns I plan to knit into socks, which I offer forthwith. Hmmm. I am listening to Recorded Books’ History of the English Language these days. I fell back on their trusted lecture series after I’d struck out 3 times with assorted novels on tape. I tried a Janet Evonovich - an extraordinarily popular author I have yet to read - but my musician’s ear nearly inverted after listening to an assumed New Jersey working class accent for half an hour. I gave James Patterson a fling - only to discover that listening to a sex/love scene is ... utterly repulsive. The sighs of a lover either have to come from someone I love, or have to be diluted by engaging my eyes with very handsome movie actors, which even then might not be enough to ease the sensation of being a Peeping Tom. Good sex scenes belong between the covers, either of my bed or a book. Then I can make the sights and sounds exactly to suit my taste - at which time, if it is well written, one can be thoroughly entertained. I tried a novel called The Thirteenth Tale, but the reader’s voice hit right at a decibel level where my own hearing is weak - I couldn’t hear anything unless I cranked up the volume as loud as your average grocery store parking lot boom blasting youth’s - and even though I suspect the book might be quite good, no novel is worth loosing my hearing over. And so I returned to my faithful Modern Scholar Series, which has almost never disappointed me, but instead, has beguiled, entertained and informed me in 30 minute increments for several years now. And the title that grabbed my attention was the above mentioned History of English. And if you aren’t laughing at the absurdity of my claim that I have nothing to say today, I hope you will be tickled by this bit-0-info about this particular series. The professor (alas, I don’t remember his name) spends 15 minutes discussing the theory that; though there can be a finite, even if enormously large, number of words, they can be arranged into an infinite number of sentences. Since this is completely unlike the logic of math, he claims it took him many years to reconcile himself to this truth, and so to help us leap over this particular grammatical paradigm, he gives, as an example, an Earnest Hemmingway sentence that contains several hundred words. He shows you how it can be made longer by saying "Martha told me that ..." + sentence, which can be further extended by saying "After tea on Monday, Martha told me..." + sentence. So, you see, one can do that infinitely, thus the theory is proved - at least to the professor and to me. But what really struck me was how very long Hemmingway’s sentence was - and how quickly I lost the thread he was trying to give me, among the tangle of loose ends and digressions which formed, not just a haze about it, but perhaps, one might say, even linguistic pills! And so. And so I am really trying to write long sentences here just to see if I can keep hold of my own attention and, one hopes, yours too. I believe, the longest sentence so far is 64 words at the end of paragraph two, but my favorite is the second sentence in my opening paragraph. And if you are still reading this, I do hope you are laughing your head off at me, or at least chuckling and saying to yourself, "Yes. Language is absurd, but not quite so absurd as the people who use it." By the way, I also like puns, and do not at all think they are low humor. As for those photos - well - I’ll post them later today, where the computers aren’t 20 years old. posted by Bess | 8:16 AM |
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