Undulating Ungulate

does anyone want to read this book I’ve been writing? I’m hoping to print a couple of copies before I go away tomorrow. Preference goes to people who will actually read it in a reasonable span of time rather than people who will put it on a shelf for months.

The one condition is that you don’t tell anyone anything about it.

[Update: too late, I'm off, see you in a while. No time to print more. A copy has one reader booked; after that it is floating about, however...]

Filed by billy at 1:16 am under the moose
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“Alas, as long as we are not attending to the real problems of the Middle East, of its record of suffering and injustice, it – al-Qa’ida – will still be with us. My year began with a massive explosion in Beirut, just 400 metres from me, as a bomb killed the ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri. It continued on 7 July when a bomb blew up two trains back from me on the Piccadilly line. Oh, the dangerous world we live in now. I suppose we all have to make our personal choices these days. Mine is that I am not going to allow 11 September 2001 to change my world. Bush may believe that 19 Arab murderers changed his world. But I’m not going to let them change mine. I hope I’m right. ” – Robert Fisk

Filed by billy at 12:19 am under politics,quotes
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There’s a webcam pointed at the pyramids in Egypt, which is neat.
This is an anomaly they recorded the other day.

Filed by billy at 12:17 am under the world
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The Japanese word “chokuegambo” describes the wish that there were more designer-brand shops on a given street. (here)

Sadly, we of the dancing moose have never yet felt chokeugambo. How long must we wait?

Slightly more seriously, I love this sort of thing. (An old favourite, I forget the word, was from Spanish, and meant “to kill a chicken by throwing oranges at it”.) Language is a wonderful, wonderful thing. It also illustrates the weird universality – we can recognise the concept despite its unfamiliarity – but also that until we have the word we cannot think in those terms. What else awaits discovery? Strange “facts” we have yet to realise. Forgotten insights in dead tongues.

Filed by billy at 12:04 am under culture,language
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