Things I learned while looking up other things, 2020.4.11
If you need some encouragement right now, the work of poster designer Abram Games might help.
There is a Wikimedia Commons category for "Graves with potatoes". One of those graves is Frederick the Great's, and this whole article about Frederick the Great made me say wtf??!? several times, but also made me want to read a longer biography of the man. (A taster: he named his greyhounds after the King of France's mistresses to make the king angry; at six his father gave him a regiment of children to lead in drill exercises.)
I don't know about you, but I've been having some trouble with my attention span lately. The only thing that seems to be keeping me from falling head-first down the Twitter hole is holding to 'Nulla dies sine linea'—'no day without a line', a motto attributed to the painter Apelles by Pliny. Apelles supposedly never allowed a day to pass without picking up his pencil; it's surprising how comforting it can be to make the tiniest, most insignificant changes to a large project (writing just one sentence, adding just one unit test, cutting just one pattern piece, tidying just one shelf, reading just a few pages of Boswell's Life of Johnson) when you have absolutely zero control over waves hand in general direction of the world ...
Some sentences that have recently struck me:
In his youth, he was given the nickname Nick, which is short for "nickname."
In 1905, she was flung from the back of a bolting camel in London Zoo, knocked out, and after regaining consciousness, nicknamed ‘Tuffy’.As for Scarlet O'Neil she has yet to switch her off her invisibility and no one knows where she is.
A one-legged man, ‘Bumper’ Harris, was hired to ride for a whole day on the first installation – it was at Earls Court – to show how easy it was.
(Two of those sentences are from articles I found through Diverted Traffic, a new newsletter from the London Review of Books.)
Are you wondering how you could get so far down in this newsletter without the foreshadowed Samuel Johnson content? Wonder no further, here it is:
BOSWELL. “Is not the Giant's Causeway worth seeing?"
JOHNSON. “Worth seeing? yes; but not worth going to see."
The 'ditloid' style of word puzzle gets its name from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Did you know you can buy robot vacuum stickers on Etsy, so that you can mark in your bullet journal when to let the Roomba loose? (I want to buy these to use in conjunction with word-balloon stickers ... Roombaversations?)
If you like, send me a sentence that's struck you—striking sentences are underrated. Please don't send me sentences containing the word 'analprint'.
Here's an inspirational Wordnik list for you to get you through your next interminable video meeting. Hope you and yours are—and stay—well.
Your friend,
Erin