saunders

Hail Aloreal,to whom my gmail membership is due! All is well here. We didn't even know they were memes back then, just in jokes. Arctic survives, and so does Scorpius. Beloved and I have granddaughters, who are a delight. Stay well!

I had Canaliste, once upon a time, but that account got wiped, along with my tiny member number. The low post count on this one has to act as proxy. Hugs to you suvivors!

I burgled, and got number 23, which it later ate. It was not hard to deduce what the address would be, and in those innocent days nothing stopped me making an account.

My word! Greetings to Motrax and Sullust! It's hard to think that Misc died so long ago.

Scorpius my lamb! what are you playing at these days? Come round to my house and you can check out our new bento boxes!

I am in Sydney.

Lastborn heads off to California in the summer to begin his PhD studies. It will be interesting to see how they do differ from my experience in the UK and French systems. He's studying anthripology, and it seems that the first couple of years will cover research methods as well as a language. (I hesitate to say foreign, as his will be Spanish) One of the things he has already realised is that UK students are expected to read a lot more research papers as part of their undergraduate work than US students do.

Stendahl liked screw-ups as his central characters, who just blunder through life. I agree about the lack of plot in Anathem, though. Universities as places where research does not take place: very interesting comment. I think that the research would have to be a plot driver if it were taking place, and mostly the change in knowledge is incremental and evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

For depth of history, you might like Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It starts with a lot of exposition, but raises some very interesting ideas, and has a lot of action in strangely distributed slices.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm... feel the Lourve!

I think it was "ou sont les Neigedens d'antan?". This keyboard doesn't do diacriticals. Ils sont partis, elles sont parties, for gender consistency: neige is feminine, so let's all say together "la neige". "elles s'en sont enfuies" is more poetical. I was "la Canaliste" till my identity was eaten, a wound which will not heal quickly. These are random answers, thus preserving off-topicness.

The other massive innovation with golf ball and daisy wheel typewriters was that they enabled you to change your font. That actually deserves sparly and multicoloured effects. Up till then the biggest choice you could make was whether to use 10 cpi (pica) or 12 cpi (elite). I still have a very early folding typewriter that would allow you to type in black or red, if you had the right type of ribbon.

Quid is pro quo

Yes indeed. I am inspired to read his Catherine the Great now.

A biography of Peter the Great of Russia. An astonishing man!