Heading off to Hamburg tomorrow for ESSLLI. Posting will be even more sporadic than usual.
On my way to work this morning, I heard a sheep bleating. A bit surprising, in the centre of Amsterdam, and especially when it seemed to be coming from a canal… Turned out to be this little guy:
Fuut (Great Crested Grebe), slightly out of focus
I think he had a fish when I first saw him, I suppose he might have been calling to his young? In any case nobody turned up, and he stopped baaing after a while and ate it himself.
I went into Scheltema this morning. I wasn’t even looking for a book… but I got sidetracked (it’s a five-storey bookstore, in retrospect it was inevitable). I got caught by this.
That’s Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip. (It’s actually “Volume 1″ of “The Complete…”, projected to run to five volumes, which to my mind is a bit of dodgy advertising, but whatever.)
My day is complete.
Last night the Black Seeds played the Melkweg. I didn’t go, because today they were on the verandah of Timboektoe, a beach bar. So today I cycled to Wijk aan Zee… and got so lost along the way that I missed the gig.
I can’t post photos yet, for ridiculous technological reasons. I made a map, though, with commentary on various significant occurrences and parts of the trip. (Don’t seem to be able to embed that here either, shame.)
All told it seems to be about 75 km, which I’m fairly pleased with. Would have been even more pleased, of course, if I’d got to hear the band…
Joachim Fersengeld, a German, wrote his Pericalypse in Dutch (he hardly knows the language, which he himself admits in the Introduction) and published it in France, a country notorious for its dreadful proofreading. The writer of these words also does not, strictly speaking, know Dutch, but going by the title of the book, the English Introduction, and a few understandable expressions here and there in the text, he has concluded that he can pass muster as a reviewer after all.
—Stanislaw Lem, A Perfect Vacuum (a collection of reviews of nonexistant books)
They’re filming Watchmen.
They’re filming Watchmen.
Whether it’s a train wreck or a triumph, I am seeing that film.
An old friend of mine has a new website, showing her awesome handmade jewellery.
You might also like to trot over to my sister’s site, aSpire Arts, and check out her weavings. Don’t bother trying to contact her though, she’s in Mongolia for a few months.
This morning at the breakfast table:
—Do you need the milk?
—No, there’s no cereal left.
—It’s very good with the biscuits. But I will not tell you, so I can eat them all myself.
… and the living is easy.
The book I’m reading is the first Narbonic collection, a previously-web comic about evil mad scientists; there are four more and a sixth on the horizon. The story’s over (and rerunning as “The Director’s Cut”, with commentary), the archives are open, you know what to do.
Sincere thanks to Freek for the photo, Shaenon Garrity for the comic, and the Dutch weather for the opportunity. Well, two out of three ain’t bad, no?
The papers are published in their original form, except for minor corrections (such as, at one point, changing “true” to “false” and at another “guilt” to “innocence”).
–Robert Stalnaker, in the acknowledgements to Context and Content.