Tag: books

One third down

I started this project of posting something to my blog every
day on February 25, four months ago. So if it ends up being a one-year
project, it’s one third done.

I have been successful at making a post every day. The only
one that was a real “I can’t post today” post was last Saturday.
And I really was over half way done with a fairly long and
difficult post which I really did post the next day. John Scalzi, one of my
role models for doing this, is known for posting a picture of
his cat when he doesn’t feel like writing, but he’s also done,
“I don’t feel like writing today” posts.

You as readers can tell better than I can how well it’s worked
for entertaining the readers, but there do seem to be some
readers. I started keeping track of how many hits things have
gotten in April sometime. And it looks like even the most
inconsequential posts get a couple of dozen readers, and the
ones that get hit by a search, or have been pointed to in a
large mailing list, get hundreds.

Speaking as a writer, it has done some of what I wanted it to
— I now know a lot more than I did a few months ago how to pick
a subject I can write about in less than an hour, and how to
polish the 20-30 minutes of writing into coherence and then stop
and publish.

I was thinking it would be possible to see what the blogging
has done for my writing by reading the blogs from the Boston
Early Music Festival two years ago
and this
year. Actually, there wasn’t as much difference in quality
of writing as I’d hoped for. The editing was definitely better
this year, and I think I’m more comfortable letting my
personality come out now. The quantity was definitely more two
years ago, but I remember that quantity as being very
difficult. This year I just decided it wasn’t possible to blog
and do 11 PM concerts and do morning concerts, so I just didn’t
do anything in the morning.

One disappointment about the blog as a way to connect with
people is that there really isn’t as much feedback as with the
other kinds of internet writing I do. If you post to a mailing
list or email a friend, it immediately becomes obvious if you haven’t
made your point. If you write a post on your blog, it’s quite
likely that you won’t get any comments at all. But it looks
like my audience has doubled in the last four months, so maybe
if I keep going I’ll eventually get an audience that
comments.

In terms of using the numbers of readers as a guide to what to
post about, it’s pretty inconclusive. It looks like of the easy
categories, the ones about food are read more than the ones
about the garden. The ones about using technology are also read
pretty often, probably because it’s something that people are
used to using google as a way to find answers for.

Another thing I hoped to accomplish was writing about my
experiences being involved in Bonnie’s death. That has
certainly happened more than it would have otherwise, but less
than I expected. This is partly because I still don’t have the
knack of breaking that subject up into small enough topics that
I can make those posts easy ones. Maybe I’ll get better at
it. Or maybe I’ll clear more time for hard posts, but that
doesn’t sound very likely. I’m still in the throes of the Serpent Publications
websiteredesign, and when that’s done, I’ll have to move on
to redesigning this site.

The posts about books and movies are usually pretty easy, and
seem to get read fairly often. For the
most read one, about Little Dorrit, I
took the precaution of taking brief notes over the week or so I
was reading the book, so I ended up with several interesting
things already written. I should try to be more organized about
doing that.

One surprising thing is that none of the people who actually
know me personally seems to read the blog regularly. This
actually makes it easier — I don’t use anyone’s actual name
when I write about them, but I certainly sometimes say enough to
make it clear to someone who knows my friends who I’m talking
about.

So, Gentle Reader, do let me know what you think. If there’s a
topic you’d like more (or fewer) posts about, let me know. If
you’d rather have pictures of Sunny or the garden than “I can’t
post today” posts, let me know. If I’m being completely
incomprehensible about something, tell me and I’ll try to clarify.

Revolutionary Road, the movie

I posted about
the book a few weeks ago, and said I wasn’t going to bother
with the movie, but I watched it last night anyway.

It was actually better than I expected. Kate Winslett is
pretty good, although I still kept seeing January Jones from Mad
Men instead. As I expected, Leonardo DaCaprio’s matinée
idol good looks aren’t really right for Frank. And of course,
they don’t have anything like as much good detail in a 2-hour
movie as in a 300 page book.

For instance, the first scene in the book, which really grabs
the reader, goes into a great amount of detail about why the
production of Bus Stop that April stars in is such
a flop in spite of all the hard work that a lot of people did.
The movie skips all that and goes straight to the audience
reaction.

Another scene that’s especially good in the book and left out
of the movie was when April cleans all the dirtiest parts of the
house before botching the abortion.

I wasn’t especially impressed with the costumes and scenery,
but the sound track was definitely an addition.

Michael Shannon,
who plays the mentally ill son of the real estate lady was
especially good in a fairly difficult role.

So on the whole, read the book or watch Mad Men if
you really want period melodrama, but if you’ve done that and
still want some more, it’s not a terrible movie.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0307454622&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0016Q2D66&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000YABIQ6&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001GCUER0&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

I’m reading a PDF book

I posted a
couple of days ago about my difficulties in reading PDF files
on the Nokia
N810. I also started a thread on the maemo-users
list, which you can read here.

The upshot is that I discovered that although the interface is
quite misguided in a number of ways, if you pull your stylus out
and fiddle with it enough, you can in fact read a PDF.

I still think it’s odd that a program that’s called a “reader”
doesn’t present the user with one button that always moves to the
next text to read. The way I actually have to read is to stroke
the stylus up and left to move the page around on a screen, and
then tap an invisible button on the right side of the screen to
move to the next page.

If they wanted to call it a “viewer” and not a “reader”, I
could understand this interface — it actually does let you go to
any part of the PDF file and view it at a wide variety of sizes.
But to me “reading” means going continuously through the text, and
this “reader” just doesn’t seem to be designed for that.

Another interesting point about that thread is that at least
two of the four people who participated (I’m one of them) were
interested in the problem because we were trying to read the
packet of Hugo award nominees which you can get by going to the Anticipation
website and joining. Without joining, you can read or download
(but not vote on) a large number of the nominees from the Hugos page
on the anticipation site.

Although you would expect Hugo nominated Science Fiction
writers and publishers to be more interested in how to implement
mobile technologies than the average publisher or writer, a large
fraction of the material is provided as PDF’s formated for the
printed page. No matter how good the interface design on the PDF
reader, a reflowable format is always going to be more flexible
for being read by a wide variety of people on a wide variety of
devices.

If you’re interested, the book I’m reading is Zoe’s
Tale by John Scalzi.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000EUGX70&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Reading PDF’s on the N810

I’m working hard on setting up the Serpent Publications
site, so you’re getting an email I wrote to a list on
something I’ve already goofed off about.

I’ll let you know if I get a useful answer.

Subject: pdf reading?

To: maemo-users@maemo.org

Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 13:36:26 -0400

I’m finding the interface on the included pdf reader on my Nokia
N810
pretty unusable.

My impression is that people on this list have mentioned that evince
might be better, but I can’t install that.

At least one of these problems must be fixable. So here are my
questions:

Included reader:
The file selector dialog (not only here but in the file manager
and other apps, but not FBReader) doesn’t allow me to select
from the external memory card (mounted as /media/mmc1), although
it does from the internal memory card (mounted as /media/mmc2).
Is there a way to fix this? I worked around it by opening a
terminal and copying the file I wanted to see from external to
internal, but there has to be a better way than that.
As far as I can see, the way to page down is to open the case
and use the down button on the pad. Is there a way to configure
it so that the +/- switch on top (preferable) or the buttons on
the side page up or down?
I have it zoomed to a size where the text area of the page is
the width of the screen, that is, the margins are off the
reader. But when moving down gets to a new page, the reader
resets the position of the page so that the left edge of the
page is at the left edge of the screen. Is there a way to tell
it not to do that?
evince:

This is generally true of a lot of the apps I try to install
from the application manager. It’s listed in “Installable
Apps”, but when I try to install it, it says, “Unable to install
evince. Some applications packages required for the
installation are missing.” When I click “Details”, it says,
“Application packages missing: libhildonfm2 (>=1;1.9.49)” Is
there a way to work around this?

If I do install it, will I have the same problems I do on the
included PDF reader?

This is somewhat frustrating, because people who don’t read
books on a mobile device do tend to assume that PDF is the way
to electronically distribute a book, and I could in fact read
them on the Nokia if the interface were a little bit better.
That is, for the book I’m trying to read, if the screen tries to
show both the printed area and the margins, the type is too
small for my 58 year old eyes, but if I can zoom it to where the
print area is the size of the screen, it’s readable without
glasses. But the designers of the application don’t seem to
have considered this usage pattern.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000EUGX70&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Last Chance Harvey

This movie was a disappointment. Obviously
anyone who’s a huge fan of either Dustin Hoffman or Emma
Thompson is going to want to watch it. I won’t say we’re
wrong to want that, but really, there are better ways to spend
an evening. It’s slow-moving and in spite of a lot of really
good acting, not really a very convincing plot. You do believe
that they’re attracted to each other, but not that they really
convince themselves to give up their whole lives for each other
in less than a week.

I have a subjective reason for disliking movies where Dustin
Hoffman looks old — I graduated from high school the summer The Graduate came out, so I basically think of
him as my age. This is an oversimplification — the character
in The Graduate has just graduated from college,
not high school, and of course Dustin Hoffman was quite
a bit older than the character he was playing. So he’s actually fourteen years older than I am, but I still think of him as
a contemporary.

I no longer have the problem I had for quite a while after
reading Heartburn by Norah Ephron. Because he
played Carl Bernstein (Ephron’s ex-husband) in All the Presidents’
Men, I kept thinking of him as the person who was so mean
to Norah Ephron. But since the movie of
Heartburn came out, I now know it was Jack
Nicholson who was so mean to Norah Ephron, and that’s really an
easier fiction to sustain.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0015OKWKS&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00000F798&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0679767959&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001LL9YRM&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000CEXEWA&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Site Redesign Progress

I finally got started on the site redesign, so this has to be a
short one.

It’s the kind of project that every time you solve one problem,
three others pop up, so I suspect it will be at least days if not
weeks before I have it ready even for friendly perusal, let
alone to loose on the unsuspecting public.

I’m starting with the thematic wordpress
theme framework. It allegedly lets you customize almost
anything, but that turns out to be only true if you know CSS. I
learned a bit about it the last time I did site redesign, and
actually sort of liked the look of the site I did for the Boston
Recorder Society (they changed it when I stopped maintaining it,
so you can’t see it there). Anyway, I have the mechanics pretty
much the way I want them, and the look something like the old
BRS site, so now all I have to do is:

  • Write the content for the new pages, including the new
    search form.
  • Fiddle with both LaTeX and Gimp to get the banner at the top
    of the pages right.
  • Fiddle with the wordpress stuff so the sidebars and footers
    are the way I want them.

My accomplishments for yesterday included:

  • Finding where the home page on the new hosting site should go. I
    broke accessing it altogether twice yesterday afternoon trying
    to be too cute about that.
  • Setting up a test environment on my home machine. There’s
    still work to do on this, because I used the Ubuntu wordpress
    package to do it, so I have to fiddle with permissions and
    ownership and groups and maybe links before it really lets me
    work on it right. But I made substantial progress.
  • This morning before breakfast, I installed keyring and now I can do openssh to both the old
    and the new hosting sites without entering passphrases.

I was frustrated enough yesterday when I had access to the new
site broken and hadn’t yet figured out how to customize anything
in thematic that I considered just going to bed and reading
trash fiction, but I have persevered, so far.

The most inspiring story I learned in high school was in the
history of English literature book. Thomas Carlyle had spend
several years writing the history of the French Revolution, and
he gave the only copy of the manuscript to his friend Macauley
to see what he thought. Macauley’s maid (at least, she had to
take the rap) thought it was trash and put it in the fire.
Carlisle went to bed and read trashy fiction for a week and then
got up and wrote the book over again.

I admit that story has more often inspired me to go to bed and
read trashy fiction than to write the history of the French
Revolution. But it’s really true that there are times you just
shouldn’t be doing some things, and it was looking like
yesterday afternoon was the wrong time to be slaving over a hot
computer.

Buying ebooks, Part II

I’m sure you’re sitting on the edge of your seat to find out
what happened to my quest to give the publishing industry money
for a book I can read on my Nokia 810 Internet
Tablet.

I told you a couple of days ago about trying
to buy a .lit book from a linux computer running firefox.

Next I tried buying one from a Windows computer running
Internet Explorer. Here’s what I wrote about it to a mailing
list that discusses such things:

I keep hearing (I think on this list as well as other places) that
people buy ebooks at fictionwise.com in .lit format, and then use clit
to turn them into html and read them on the platform of their choice.

I have occasionally gotten a .lit format book from somewhere and been
able to use clit to read it, but I’d never seen one I wanted to buy.

Then last week, I found out that The Lord of the Rings is now
available as an official ebook, and decided I would buy it.

This turns out to be too hard for me to do. You would think that if I
wanted to give someone $30 for a book, they would give me the book, but
not if Microsoft is involved.

First they said I should get a free one to make sure I had a process for
making it work. That sounded reasonable, and they actually sold me a
free ebook without asking for my credit card number.

Then I went to download it, and they said I had to be on a Windows
computer (and in Windows Explorer).

So I went away, but after a few days, I realized I had a couple of other
things I needed to boot windows to do, so I booted Windows, and fired up
IE and went to my bookshelf in Fictionwise.

Then they said I needed the latest Microsoft Reader software, so I
downloaded that.

Then they said I needed to activate the Reader on that computer. It
took quite a while to find out how I should do that, and I had to type
illegible characters several times to set up a Passport account.

Then they said I needed to install ActiveX, without telling me how to do
that. I did a search, and found someone who had the same problem and
had been told that it’s a browser option and where to go to change it,
so I did that.

But I’m still getting the error message about needing ActiveX, or to be
logged in as a real user (which I am).

So how do you buy a .lit book from Fictionwise, if you do, or is there
some other way to get commercial DRM books like the Tolkein that will
let me read it on a linux computer?

And how does anyone stay in business if it’s this hard to buy something
from them?

This reminds me of the time when I was in college and the lock to my
dorm room was balky, so I started thinking about getting the kind of
religion where you don’t ever lock your door. I already almost have the
kind of religion where I never buy DRM, and it looks like I’m not
capable of backsliding from it even if I want to.

One of the readers of the list took pity on my and sent me a
500 line python script that converts ereader books to html.

So this morning, I bought The Hobbit from fictionwise in the secure ereader
format. I had to tell the download program my name and credit
card information, but then it just gave me the file, without
complaining about what browser I was using or making me type
illegible characters or anything.

After that, there was only an hour or so of debugging, and now
the book looks pretty good in all of ereader running under Wine, firefox, and FBReader.

Actually, it looks a bit better in firefox than in the other
versions. FBReader is clumsy about placing the .png files for
the runes, and eReader doesn’t indent the verse gracefully.

For those who want the gory details, the two problems I had to
fix before the HTML displayed correctly were:

  • The .html file didn’t specify the character encoding, so all the
    quotation marks and such were displayed as something like 222
    in emacs, and as a ? in a diamond box in firefox. The fix was
    to put:
    <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
    charset=ISO-8859-1">

    at the top of the file.

  • The html file referred to a lot of the graphics as generated
    filenames
    with mixed case letters, but the script had actually written the
    names with all lower case. I haven’t scripted that fix yet, but
    if I hit the problem again, I probably will.

I haven’t yet read it on the Nokia, but my experience is that
if FBReader on the desktop can read it, so can FBReader on the
tablet.

So if you want electronic books without being a pirate, you can
have them, even if you want to use non-commercial software to
read them.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001CX5UAO&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Buying ebooks

On my list for later this morning is to boot the laptop into
windows and do several things I can’t do on linux:

  • Print the final tax returns from TaxCut.
  • Fix some annoyances with the Universal remote
    setup    .
  • See if it’s really possible to buy DRM’d books from Fictionwise and read them
    on a non-comercial OS.

The others have been discussed at length (taxes
and remote); this is the day for
my rant on the ebook marketplace.

I’m surprised that this topic hasn’t come up before, more than
two months into this daily blog, because a lot of the blogs I
read are devoted to rants about the publishing industry’s
benighted attitude towards ebooks. So I would have expected to
have wanted to rant myself before this, but it wasn’t until last
week that I felt the rant coming on.

What happened last week was the discovery that
The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit
and The Children of Hurin, but apparently not
The Silmarillion) is available in official ebook
form.

I’ve had an illegal download for some time, and that’s the way
I reread it these days, but it certainly isn’t ideal — it
screws up all the letters with accents, for instance. So
although I’ve already bought it in both paperback and hardcover,
I would be willing to buy it again as an ebook, if that meant I
could read it on my device of choice (the Nokia
N810).

If you haven’t been following this topic, the major topic of
debate is the fact that many publishers and authors aren’t
comfortable just letting you download a book in a format like html
or text or various open book-specific formats that you
can read on any computer you can put it on. They feel that there
will be too much piracy, and they’re only comfortable letting you
buy their books if they have something called DRM (digital rights
management) attached to them. There are a lot of good arguments
against this point of view. The most concise summary of them is
that if you buy a book with DRM, you don’t own it, you’re only
renting it for an unknown length of time.

The conventional wisdom these days is that if you need to
convert a DRM’d ebook to something readable on an open platform,
the Microsoft .lit form is the format of choice, since it’s
apparently just a wrapper around some html. So once you’ve
unwrapped it, you aren’t any longer bound by the DRM limitations.

So when I found that Fictionwise didn’t have Tolkein’s books in
what they call “multiformat”, which means you can download any
of a number of open formats to any device you like once you’ve
paid for it, I attempted to buy them in .lit format.

The shopping cart was fairly confusing, but I manged to get to
where I could push a button to complete the purchase, but it
warned me that I should download a free one first to verify that
I would be able to read it on my platform of choice.

That sounded like a good idea, so I moved all the Tolkeins to
my wish list, and tried to “buy” the suggested free .lit
book.

They had no problem letting me do a $0.00 purchase without
giving them my credit card number (don’t laugh — lots of
shopping carts won’t), but then when I went to
download it, I couldn’t because I wasn’t on a Windows
computer.

So in order to give them lots of money for a book I want to
buy, I have to boot an operating system I don’t want to run.

And then they’re surprised that ebooks aren’t taking off
faster.

If you do want to see whether you like ebooks, I recommend
getting started the way I did — either download works that are
out of copyright from gutenberg or manybooks, or buy non-DRM’d
books from Baen or
fictionwise.

Maybe it will turn out that there’s a way to get DRM’d books to
work without booting windows, or that booting the windows
occasionally to do the download is worth being able to get the
books. If so, I’ll let you know.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000EUGX70&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001CX5UAO&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Little Dorrit

I watched the last episode of the television adaptation on
Sunday, and finished rereading the book yesterday.

It’s a good adaptation, and the plot of the book is convoluted
enough that seeing the adaptation helps in reading the book, even
if you’re used to the
the convoluted plots of nineteenth century novels and soap
operas.

Of course, an eight hour TV show has to leave out a lot of
stuff from a 900 page book. I was especially sorry to lose the
impoverished music publisher. (He’s Mrs. Plornish’s father, who
at the beginning of the book is living in the Workhouse so as
not to take food out of the mouths of the Plornish
children.)

I think even the experienced adaptors who did this one chafed
at the restrictions, because the end seemed unusually
compressed, leaving us with no idea of what happens to several
characters who have been fairly carefully described (most
notably Minnie Meagles and her husband).

Of course, Dickens’ treatment of the business tycoon who steals
from one fund to pay off the investors in other funds and finally
loses money for all the main characters seems especially
contemporary.

The subplot where Miss Wade convinces Tattycorum (Harriet) to
leave her employment with the Meagles and live with her is a
little harder to translate to the twentyfirst century. One
reviewer suggested this was because of the hint of a lesbian
affair, but actually Dickens does hint at that. Mr. Meagles says
to Miss Wade:

‘If it should
happen that you are a woman, who, from whatever cause, has a perverted
delight in making a sister-woman as wretched as she is (I am old enough
to have heard of such), I warn her against you, and I warn you against
yourself.’

The problem is
that we are initially inclined to sympathize with Harriet for
feeling oppressed and ignored, where Dickens really believes she
should be grateful and submissive to such excellent people who are
being so kind to her.

Here are a few notes on things I picked up on on this reading
that you might not have noticed.

White Sand and Grey Sand
This is mentioned when Mr. Panks is hanging around the
Marshalsea while he’s researching Mr. Dorrit’s inheritance. He
explains to Amy and Mr. Clennam,

‘I am spending the evening with the rest of ’em,’ said Pancks. ‘I’ve
been singing. I’ve been taking a part in White sand and grey sand.
I don’t know anything about it. Never mind. I’ll take any part in
anything. It’s all the same, if you’re loud enough.’

It’s actually a round — the person who taught it to me thought
it was Ravenscroft, but I don’t find it there.
[music]

Prunes and Prisms
I first ran into this phrase in Little Women, where Jo says
to Laurie:

“Hold your tongue!” cried Jo, covering her ears. “‘Prunes
and prisms’ are my doom, and I may as well make up my mind to
it. I came here to moralize, not to hear things that make me
skip to think of.”

If I’d thought of it, I would have known it was a quotation, and would
have probably guessed it was Dickens, but I wouldn’t have
guessed anything as good as what Mrs. General tells Amy Dorrit
when explaining why it’s more genteel and feminine to say “Papa”
than “Father”.

‘Papa is a preferable mode of address,’ observed Mrs General. ‘Father is
rather vulgar, my dear. The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to
the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very
good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism. You will find it
serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to
yourself in company–on entering a room, for instance–Papa, potatoes,
poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.’

Plethoric
I also learned a new word. It means having a florid, ruddy
face. It occurs describing the customers at the inn in the
Swiss alps:

The third party, which had ascended from the valley
on the Italian side of the Pass, and had arrived first, were four in
number: a plethoric, hungry, and silent German tutor in spectacles, on
a tour with three young men, his pupils, all plethoric, hungry, and
silent, and all in spectacles.

The derivation is from plethora, implying that the face is red because
of a plethora of blood.

Following up

Spring

I mentioned that I’d retired my winter jacket for the Spring on
Good Friday. This turns out to have been a
couple of days early, as there was a cold, raw wind on Easter
Sunday morning. Since then, my lightweight spring jacket has been
fine, though.

Baseball

Immediately after the Opening Day game that I wrote about, the Red Sox all (except first baseman
Kevin Youkilis) went into hitting slumps, and the starting
pitchers all had trouble getting hitters out. Luckily, the
defense and the bullpen were solid.
Amalie Benjamin of the Boston Globe wrote an article saying:

So the day after Beckett said the Sox have to pitch
better, have to play better, have to do everything better, nothing
was better.

And a disgruntled fan commented:

I fully understand that it is early but like Yogi
Berra once said It can get late early!
sportsbozo1

This week they seem to have gotten everything better, and the
starting pitchers are pitching for 6 and 7 innings and the hitters
are hitting the way we expect them to.

More transcription woes

I didn’t get the corrections to Upon a hill right the first
time. All the parts ended at the same time, but for every
cadence, the cantus part cadenced later than the other two parts.
I didn’t notice listening to the MIDI file, but
when the woman singing that part, who’s a very experienced singer,
was having real trouble making it sound right, I looked at the
score, and made some more adjustments.

Handmaid’s Tale

Read the Mccarthy review after posting my review, I think the
book has gotten a lot more scary since 1986.

Chocolate Chip Brioche

I went to a large party last night and baked two batches of my
bread machine brioche, one with fruit and nuts
and one with chocolate chips. People liked both of them, but I
don’t know that I’ll repeat the chocolate chip one. One of the
points of that recipe is how much fun the dough is to play with,
and with the warm chocolate chips in it, it isn’t as much fun.