|
|
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189
Carpal Tunnel
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189 |
The Lord of the RingsYes, Jazzo! That would be it for me!...including The Hobbit as prologue.  And I guess Atlas Shrugged would have to be yours, required reading for an aspiring architect! Alas, that was another intended but never embarked-upon long-read in my life...actually leafing through it a number of times trying to convince myself to get started. [edit: I had to fix a misspelling--embraked-upon for embarked-upon...but the typo coinage fits if you think about it. A subtle subconscious intention? ]
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 3,065
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 3,065 |
I also survived Remembrance of Times Past. Can't say I was much the wiser as to what it was about by the time I'd finished though. War and Peace was easier. Not having them both to hand, I can't say whether it was longer or shorter than Lord of the Rings. I've started Clarissa a couple of times but never got much further than about a third of the way through. I'm thinking of getting myself The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for Christmas.
Bingley
Bingley
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204
Pooh-Bah
|
|
Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204 |
I am sitting here, green with envy at all of the books you've had time to read! I have a study full of books at home, very few of which I have read in full - I dip in and extract what I need for my work, and lay them aside until next time. I will, one of these days when I finally manage to retire, read some of them from cover to cover - I would love to get through the whole of E.P.Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, which is a classic (I've read about a third of it, but not in sequence!)
But I suppose I've not done too badly, over the years. - Lord of the Rings at least five times, all of Dickens novels bar Dombey and Son (scheduled for the Yuletide holiday.) Anna Karenina, biographies of a variety of British politicians, and an aborted attempt at War and Peace, which I must try again; all have figured on my reading list. My current long book, which is being read three pages at a time each night before I drop off to sleep, is Harrison Salisbury's 900 Days: the siege of Leningrad, which is fascinating, despite being very badly written.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296 |
Rhuby, Speaking of picking up and putting down a long one for a later time, Middlemarch is at the top of my list for that long read. When I picked it up, I wanted to savour it and hadn't the time. One day I will give it the time and focus I want to.
Anyone read She's Come Undone? That was a surprise unfolding as I read it. Was the central character Delores? Can't recall. But it was an interesting, somewhat long, but fast read.
WW
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204
Pooh-Bah
|
|
Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204 |
I really must try Middlemarch, myself.
I've not heard of the other one, though - details of author, please?
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
There are some wrinkles that cannot be ironed out. Years ago the comic strip "Dick Tracy" featured a villain named "Pruneface" whose face was a mass of wrinkles. The only condition I know of that could be responsible is rhagades, a dermatology lesion of late stages of an STD (acronym to spare the sensitive) with causative agent Treponema pallidum.
Maybe other participants can remember some of the other villains in the strip with interesting peculiarities.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
I wonder how the colloquialism "wrinkle" meaning "a useful innovation" came into being.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
good question Dr bill about why a wrinkle an innovation.. I would like to think it is because some one over the age of 20 came up with a good idea, and good ideas got associated with some one old enough to have wrinkles...
but it might have come out of the garment trade-- where there is a process called "shrinking the marker"
a marker is pattern lay out. because some pieces of a pattern are large (say the back of a jacket) and other small (the under portion of a sleeve) and because fabric comes in set widths.. there is a special skill called marker making. cutting table in the industry are often 10 or 12 feet long.. (3 to 4 meters) and layout to make best use of fabric.
but the marker maker might not work in the same building or city as the cutter and factory (the actual cutting and sewing would be farmed out to jobbers) .. so the marker would be copied onto tissue paper, and mailed to jobber . Somewhere along the way, some one discovered that you could crumple the tissue paper, and then smooth it out.. and if you did, you might find the marker is now 2 or 3 inches shorter.. (not much over a 12 feet.. but if you are cutting 10 layers, you have 30 inches.. and if you cut 10 layers 10 times -- now you have 300 inches.. (and most lots of cuts are in 1,000 units, not hundreds...)
and so a wily jobber could cut an extra 10 or 20 or more extra "pieces"-- which the he (she) could sell else where.. (off label)
the reduction in the size of the finished garment would be very slight.. less than 0.5%...
i don't know any where else where a "wrinkle" is a way of cheating..
an aside-- in NY (elsewhere?) if you say you have a "factory job" it means you work in a garment factory.
if you work in some sort of other factory.. you specify.. (a paper bag factory..) plain old factory work is always sewing.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
I reviewed novels for the Otago Daily Times for a number of years. The literary editor of that august newspaper was an intellectual snob of the first water and flatly refused to read novels. I was continually schmoozing around his office looking for books to read and eventually I began to get them by the carton load. I wrote reviews for over 2000 books in seven years; about 200 of the reviews were actually published - which gives you some idea of the editor's values. Most of them wound up at the local library, although I probably still have some 30 or so that I kept. You got to keep all of the books on the condition that you sent back the copy of the reviews to the publisher. Which I did, religiously.
The vast majority of the novels fell into the mediocre to mindblowingly bad/boring range. One of the worst was Mitchener's Aztec. I picked it up and put it down, picked it up and put it down and on and on for weeks. Several times I was tempted to simply review it off the dust jacket, something I'm sure that Wow will agree is not exactly uncommon. However, I persevered and eventually finished it and wrote something like "will be interesting to those who like exhaustive historical detail of dubious quality and would rather not have to sift through too much of that boring plot stuff". When I sent the review back, the person at the publisher who was responsible for these things sent me a thank you note back with all the other NZ reviews of Aztec attached. They were almost ALL literal reproductions of the dust jacket blurb ... I'm still not sure exactly what the message there was meant to be.
The very worst book it fell to my lot to review was a self-published effort by someone whose name I mercifully forget. It was a science fiction-y type of thing and was deadly dull because of the hackneyed plot and was diabolical to read because of the turgidity of the prose. The distributor sent it to the paper asking that we have a look. My review was scathing, and I thought that the distributor would take a very dim view of it. Instead, I got a whole box of self-published efforts to review. Most of them were pretty bad, which is probably a tribute to the publishing house book selectors' capabilities. But that first one was the absolute and utter worst I ever had to contend with.
Having said all of that, however, there were many gems amongst the dross. And they were anything but hard work to read and review!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
|
|
|
|
Forums16
Topics13,913
Posts229,372
Members9,182
| |
Most Online3,341
Dec 9th, 2011
|
|
|
0 members (),
381
guests, and
1
robot. |
|
Key:
Admin,
Global Mod,
Mod
|
|
|
|
