randomosity

About a year ago I adopted the French Republican Calendar for my personal journalling. Why? Really for no other reason than to be different. It offered me the opportunity to learn the Republican Calendar through practise (a word-a-day sort of arrangement). The upheaval of the switch to a new system in France in 1795, caused confusion, was not widely adopted and in the end was discontinued by Napoleon during the Empire. This was not before such references such as the Coup of 18 Brumaire and lobster Thermidor forever embedded the poeticisme of the calendaring system in our historical memory.

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Phonautograph

Moonwalking

I was entering some dummy citations into a social networked text sharing project on the weekend.
Serendipitously I chose the genre of historical fiction and ended up reflecting on some of the more memorable books I have enjoyed. At the top of that list is the memoirs of Bartholomew Wolfe Bandy by Donald Jack. This multi-volume series was very deservedly awarded the Stephen Leacock Award for humour on three occasions. This is all the more appropriate given the very Leacockian style of the Bandy papers themselves.
If you have not ever been exposed to Bandy, I can not recommend these books enough. They are superb examples of the comedic novelist’s art down the line of P.G Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and George Macdonald Fraser. Set in early twentieth century Ontario, B.W. Bandy, the hero is an Ottawa valley farm boy who heads off to fight in the First World War. He meets real life notables along the way, enjoys some of the most brilliantly told adventures and despite the comedic delivery actually teaches much about Canadian history. These novels demonstrate the close connection between literature and history - the enduring importance and beauty of a tale well told.

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Wikinear

As I read through my RSS feeds in Google Reader today, I was once again struck by the increasing number of familiar headlines. By this I don’t mean similar themes continue to be explored (although true - Hilary is clearly a bad, bad, bad woman and John McCain throws kittens into wells), but rather that I had already read the articles that were popping as new posts. My immediate thought was that Reader wasn’t catching my ‘mark as read’ flags, or that I had inadvertently created duplicate feeds. Alas, neither the case. These are the same posts…simply with different authorship claimed. Note that I am not even getting into the automated blog post piracy that is designed only to attract search engine attention.

When you try to stay on top of all your news feeds with a reader and attempt to strategically manage the multitude of feeds, the collapsing of feeds into headlines makes this phenomenon rather obvious. As I considered this, I realized that there is a certain tiering in the bloggosphere. Digg, Redit and other aggregators are at the lowest level and explicitly point to other’s posts. At the ‘highest’ level you have blogs that create absolutely original, thoughtful and unique posts. Between these there are all manners of variants. Review sites are somewhere in this milieu and they account for a substantial amount of this overlap. Some new gadget is released and the sites all tend to either hear about it or get their hands on it around the same time. Yet, it is interesting to note (when you have far too many RSS feeds coming in) post gravity and proliferation.

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Bruges at Christmas time. A lovely medieval preserved town with a festive spirit and now blessed with two hit men laying low at a quaint hotel. How can one react to this movie? In Bruges is a treat!!

Characterization and the characters are superb. Dialogue is witty and fast paced. The scenery of Bruges is shot magnificently. There are little 10 second vignette shots that work very well. The movie follows the two hit men taking refuse following a botched job. The hunker down to await a call. As Vladimir and Estragon, Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleason) adopt entertainly different approaches to their enforced tourism. Maybe its just the Irish way, but I feel some Beckett here.

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RDF Gravity

Wibrain

Dr. Kathy Garay of the McMaster Library gave a lively and fast-paced talk exploring the nature of majesty to the Medieval and Early Modern Research Group. Her paper,”Manufacturing Majesty: Elizabeth of Hungary, Diana of England and the Construction of Royal Saints, 1207-2007,” reflected on the rather striking similarities between St. Elizabeth of Hungary and Lady Diana Spencer. Particularly:

• Lineage
• Texts
• Marital Love
• In-Laws
• Beauty
• Motherhood
• The Third Person
• Charity
• Agency
• Funeral Rites
• Legacy

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