RobSog

Restaurant bills

Consequence of having an open mind

Alex Barnett. Via Preoccupations.

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Relax, everything is interconnected

Resize to 320 pixel width for iPhone wallpaper. Previous incarnation here.

Lost in translation

A bit of pointless fun; Chinese whispers through your browser window.

1. Go to Bablefish.
2. Enter text from a work of literature (up to 150 words).
3. Translate from English to Chinese (trad).
4. Copy and paste the resulting text, then translate back into English.

I chose a couple of verses from John Betjeman’s A Subaltern’s Love Song. They came out like this:

Shearman waited for, light’s in the hall, Egypt’s picture is bright on the wall, my sweet snack, I nearby the oak stair stand, and there in landing’s in yours hair's light. By road ‘It is not adopted’ From the woodlanded way, she drives the club in the summer haze last stage, enters nine-o’ Times Camberley, heavy and bell and mushroomy, pine lignin, evergreen smell.

One wonders what a typical Nigerian 419 scam might turn out like. Maybe later...

May the fourth be with you

Big bada boom

Where’s the mouse?

When quizzed about Wikipedia and you’re asked something along the lines of ‘where do they get the time,’ now you can take a line or two from Clay Shirky’s talk and respond that ‘it’s better to do something than to do nothing.’ Well at least some of the time...

The Just

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South,
a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well
though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets
of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.
Jorge Luis Borges (translation by Alastair Reid).

Beautiful wood sculpture

One of many great works by Alastair Heseltine.