Monday, February 21, 2005

Bags me Virgil and all his Contrafibularities

A good part of yesterday morning was spent on the phone to my brother as he asked questions about faces, edges and vertices for his boy's homework. I found out that I was being used as a sort of proxy internet as their PC is 'in storage' at present. Shamed me it did. Should have known that "vertex", in sharing the last two letters of "apex" is a point and that the word for an edge is in fact "edge". Still, at least I was able to tell them who Beatrice was. I was a might surprised that Dante was actually homework for a seven-year old but that was really my brother asking questions out of his dictionary. Still, let's step forward and introduce The Divine Comedy to Year 4 and see how moral the world becomes. Back on your heads lads!

Not quite as sad to see Hunter S Thompson's demise as I was about Spalding Gray. I thought that the chemical that finally saw him off would be anything other than lead but then again, maybe he saw himself as a counterculture Hemmingway. Need to read the books I suppose.

I'm currently in the middle of The Meaning of Everything for which I have to have the Dictionary in question to hand (the concise version natch) as the author seems to delight in throwing in one little-used word on each page. Some of them appear not to exist in the concise so maybe they are made-up just to be obtuse. Maybe I was spleepy and had lost my ability to look things up which, if it isn't a known medical condition, should be. There must be a syllepsis in there somewhere.

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