Categories
books

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Author
J.R.R. Tolkien

A readers pole a few years ago voted the Lord of the Rings trilogy the best books published in the past 100 years (meanwhile the editors picked James Joyce’s Ulysses, which having read I just don’t understand, but that’s another story.) This is the first installment of the Lord of the Rings, and my personal favorite of the series. The Fellowship is filled with the history of Middle Earth: it’s hero’s, it’s legends, it’s lands. It is all the stuff that is not important to the plot of the book that makes Middle Earth so memorable. Every little detail that Tolkien writes brings the land alive. You can read this one over and over again and find something new every time.

On Amazon.com

Categories
books

Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works

Author
William Shakespeare
Editor
Richard Proudfoot

Only Homer and the Bible have had a comparable effect on western culture. Who cares if William Shakespeare or the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays, it’s the plays themselves that count. Timeless archetypes of humanity in universal situations. No education is complete without some Shakespeare, and I consider myself lucky to have been born into the English speaking world so I might enjoy the Bard’s plays and sonnets to their fullest in the original language. Though, of course, “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”

Shakespeare is my favorite author, I’ve read all the plays, all the sonnets and both long poems. I own three copies of his complete works. I like the Arden Shakespeare because they are as close to “the official Shakespeare” as you can get. They are the ones what poor over all the copies of the folios to come up with a copy of each play that is as close to the original as possible. They also include a massive amount of footnotes explaining word usage, allusions and historical notes to each play. Their individual books are also excellent.

On Amazon.com

Categories
colophon

Movable Type

So I spent all day (and most of the night!) installing and moving all my journal entries over to Movable Type. There are still some flaws in the design and layout, like why my span tags work in some places but not in other, but it is all usable now. I should point out that I used a Perl script called lj2mt.pl and direction which I found in this journal entry over at amanita.net. Much thanks! The only issue I had was getting the past comments into the system. There is no way to get them out of LiveJournal at present, so I went back and manually posted all the past comments into the new journal. Took a while and all the comments have October nine as their date but c’est la vie—it’ll do.

I hope the having a “comments” posting box right on the page will make it more enticing for people to comment on stuff. I really like the ability to browse back to past issues and such through the navigation on the bottom of the screen. And re-posting all the old entries and comments gave me a chance to read my old post. I really like some of them and others scare me. I also corrected some of the spelling. Looking back there are a few entries in which I promise that I will finish a story or something and then I never got around to it (things like the T█████ saga ( here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc] and here [confusion.cc]) and my misadventures in Europe ( here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc] and here [confusion.cc]) and maybe now I will get around to finishing them… but probably not. The thing that struck me the most is that my entry for September 7, 2001 [confusion.cc] which was about the Taliban. Strange coincidence that they where in the news just days before everything happened.

Anyway, if you look around the site in the next few days and something is just not right don’t worry. I am working on fixing everything, if your are feeling in an especially helpful mood send me an email of what looks wrong. Ciao.

Categories
ranting

ted rall’s war cry

Ted Rall has posted a great article on Yahoo News entitled War Cry. A great political satire where Iranian President Mohammad Khatami makes the case for military intervention against the tyrant of America, George Bush. You have to read this.

Categories
ranting

journal problems.

I spent today looking for a good solution to the issue I have with Livejournal, not being able to go back more than 75 entries on my page. I have not found a nice solution yet. I looked at a bunch of weblog authoring systems but the biggest problem is embedding them in my system. I think Movable Type is my best bet, but I am having some problems with it. Mostly with trying to import my old journal—half of that is because Livejournal does not have a nice way of exporting my old entries.

I guess I could just start over, but there are a few old entries I really want to keep. Also not having the old entries kind of goes against the whole reason for keeping a journal. I will look into it some more. If I had a linux box set up and a high speed connection I would just write my own system I think. But here at my parents house I only have dial-up access and Windows…