I almost wish I were a sheep farmer, just so as to be eligible to read Sheep! magazine, surely the most enthusiastically named trade periodical ever. The cover of the current issue has an adorable picture of a lamb and a kitten on it, and features such intriguingly entitled articles as Golf Course Sheep Poo a Threat to Public Health, Wether or Not (aha!), and Herd It Through The Grape Vines. Fantastic.
This approach to magazine titling is probably not transferable to other professions, sadly. A pharmaceuticals trade rag called Drugs! probably wouldn’t find its way onto the lobby coffee tables at Gigantopharm UK PLC, for example.
[Original link via Errata.]
3 comments 2008-04-24 22:09 Categories: Day Job, Words
The nameless feline narrator is the best thing in Sōseki’s first novel by a mile. Witty and sarcastic, he is a scathing observer of the humans with whom he shares the world. His thoughts on trousers as a measure of human achievement provide an excellent example of his opinions:
Had mankind been created with an inborn readiness to be content with inequality, I cannot see why, born naked, they should not have been content to live and die unclothed. However, one of these primeval nudists seems to have communed with himself along the following lines. “Since I and all my fellowman are indistinguishably alike, what is the point of effort? However hard I strive I cannot of myself climb beyond the common rut. So, since I yearn to be conspicuous, I think I’ll drape myself in something that will draw the eyes and blow the minds of all these clones around me.” I would guess he thought and thought for at least ten years before he came up with a stupendous idea, that glory of man’s inventiveness, pants…
I’ve heard that it took Descartes, no intellectual slouch, a full ten years to arrive at his famous conclusion, obvious surely to any three year old, that I think and therefore I am. Since original thought is thus demonstrably difficult, perhaps one should concede that it was an intellectual feat, even if it took ten years, for the wits of proto-rickshawmen to formulate the notion of knickers. (p245)
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0 comments 2008-04-15 19:53 Categories: Books, Cats, Reviews
I made you a mix tape. Listen to it!
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6 comments 2008-04-05 10:59 Categories: Music