Linguist John McWhorter casts a kindly eye on quotation marks conveying emphasis. Fine, but when he defends "impact" used as a verb, I suggest he goes too far. "Quite simply, the verbs view, silence, worship, copy, and outlaw all began as nouns. No one has a problem with them."
ELP
As Christmas approaches, the reissues have begun to trickle in. Today's bounty was Emerson, Lake and Palmer's <I>Brain Salad Surgery</I> or what the notes call "Prog Rock's masterpiece."
Chet Raymo manages to coax an entire essay out of a description of a kiss: "The way bees on a drowsy day suck honey from fuchsia."
<I>Universe Today</I> has posted a photo of a pulsar eating a star. Well, <I>I'd</I> never seen that before.
Stevie Nicks would like her forties back. "'It was eight completely wasted years of my life.' Here's the irony, she says: the 'powers that be' had sent her to the psychiatrist in order to keep her working, but the 'treatment' he gave her made work almost impossible. 'It's very Shakespearean. It's very much a tragedy.'"
I think this is a not so subtle ruse to get guys to iron. If so, good job.
<a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118953936892024096.html">This</a…; Wall Street Journal article asks: "Are MP3s and the iPod ruining pop music?"
Moises Kaufman has written <I>33 Variations</I>, a play that explores Beethoven's obsession with Diabelli's inane little waltz. Sounds worth seeing—or you could buy <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/musicrecordings/506dia/">this</A>.
Euan Ferguson took the Tube last week. "Only three stops on the Piccadilly line between Knightsbridge and the centre of town, and I would have got there more quickly, pleasantly, and safely by crawling backwards through the linking sewers with a twitching rat in my mouth and open bleeding weals on my bare backside."