Arika Okrent's In the Land of the Invented Languages is well worth reading, especially for anybody who comes from the artlang side of the constructed language community (and that would be almost everyone these days).

( Read more... )

Every geek has a fantasy author who they plow through at an early age. For most it's Tolkien, I ended up reading Eddings first and didn't actually read LOTR until college.
( Read more... )

Fool, his latest work is intended as a tribute to British humor in general (particularly Python). While the story is nominally Lear as told by Lear's fool, this isn't a hidden story like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern. By about 20 pages in, it's taking place in a bizarro 13th century with a Discount Pope and a Retail Pope, and St. Cinnamon, who drove the Mazdas out of Swindon. There is a central conceit that Pocket, the titular Fool, engineers most of the tragedy of Lear in order to prevent Cordelia from getting married off (there is a nice scene where Edmund reveals a very whiny and emo note that he intended for Gloucester), however the story falls apart because of Moore's general weakness with dramatic characters. Pocket is a reprehensible character through the story, and the only way to make him a 'hero' is to take Lear and turn him into more and more of a villain, culminating in Lear engineering the rape of Pocket's mother, the murder of Cordelia's mother. The problem is that Lear's villainy is gratuitous, and exists only to make Pocket's betrayal, murder and general villainy tolerable.

Also, quite frankly, the "bawdiness" is just dull. There's an inordinate amount of humping, pissing, wanking, snogging, farting (although relatively little bumming), but it's all tab a in slot b. There's an amusing scene where Pocket is trying to recall the name of the girl he's sleeping with, and he mixes it up in the reminescence while she tells him what it is, but in the end, it's just tedious repetition.

1) An episode where, to save a patient, he eats a live baby.

2) An episode where House and Wilson finally give in to their mutual lust. (Let's be honest, they despise each other. The only thing keeping them going is the promise of sex).

This, incidentally, is why school textbooks in the US are such an almighty disaster. The license to print money is to get Texan/CA approval, and that's it. Their adoption policy and their sheer size means that the publishers bow to them first, and this means that the most successful books are the ones that can pass muster in both states. Imagine the kind of history textbooks that can get through; now you know why your history textbooks were soul-destroying pabulum.

So, what happens if the Texan BOE decides to vote against science? Well, unless textbook publishers decide that intellectual integrity is more important than the Texas market, then we're going to see creationist drivel popping up everywhere.