punctuation continued

The angle bracket or chevron are what we call < and >. Here’s a little html character reference for anyone who can’t sleep.

More interesting but infinitely less useful is this Wiki entry about the irony mark.

Proofreader’s Found Words of Wisdom

With the publication of this product information all others lose your validity.

(gong…)

It’s Julie’s birthday in two days
I can’t wait to show her what I got her. Wanna see it? Here.

psst…. Wanna see Graham’s new digs? Okay. Here. This was a video he made for his brother Reid. An insanely huge house smack dab in Rivendell just round the bend from Washington and Lee. Graham might not have noticed it, but if you listen closely you can hear the house creaking and pining for the pitter-patter of little watchamacallits. Beware, gentle Graham!

You can’t get there from here Sad but true. here

And what pray tell is a “freegan”?

Glad you asked. Well:

According to a recent report, 70 per cent of produce is dumped by producers and retailers before it even gets to the store. So, will ignoring use-by and sell-by dates help? One quarter of all the food waste that goes into British landfill is reckoned to be edible, and a sizeable portion of that will be food with highly conservative end-of-life dates. Here

I made a short nature film about the lil hedgehog who came to live in our garden. Dig it:

I really enjoyed reading Julie’s blog today. You can read it here. This of course was the translation brought to you by babblefisk. To read the actual blog, click here.

Here’s a new video of mine on that you tube thing: “Apartment Alphabet Inventory” Here.

The Devil’s Beatin’ his Wife is what Mom always said when the was sunshining during a rain shower. When I repeat this little tidbit of folksy weather persnickerdoodle to my friends — which I do every time the sunshines when it rains — they usually make some wry comment about southerners or ask about my upbringing.

However, as I first remember Mom uttering the phrase for the first time when we were driving down an English countryside, knowing how much she read up about England when we lived there I assumed it was an old English saying. As it turns out, my friends where right about the expression being a southern thing:

Here is what little Wiki has to say about that.

They suggest that the rain is symbolic of the wife’s tears. This much is easy; but why the sunshine, I always wondered. The idea then came to me when I read the longer version of the phrase: “The devil?s behind his kitchen door beating his wife with a frying pan.”

In a folkish sense, dark and stormy weather could easily be credited to the malicious whims of evil entities such as our mythical devil. So here, one could suggest that the devil is not out at the moment trying to do harm on the world, but he’s back home — in the kitchen — meting out abuse upon his own. Meanwhile on terra firma, all is well save a little sprinkling.

And after all, who of you has ever cursed being caught in a sunshower on an otherwise perfect summer day like the one last weekend; soon there was a rainbow that, from Albertplatz, it seemed to span across the entire Neustadt.