Improv

Den Beste has burned out. Filters failed him, popular nitpicking dragged at him, and now he’s . . . who knows? Some people will miss him.

I just spent a couple of hours or ninety minutes or some extensive period of time looking for the Questionable Content strip where Faye says, “There is not a strong enough word to describe how wrong you are!” Also I found her in “I Want Those Posters Dammit” saying, “There are not enough adjectives in the English language to describe how wrong you are.” Googling “describe how wrong you are” I got five results, so it looks as if QC's truly indie on this. Neat.

Wow, Kip’s got it worse than I do, maybe. His exegesis (“A Restless Exegesis”) really goes to extremes. I should write something like this, in reply, if nothing else.

How the heck did Sven even indirectly get from my links to an upright monkey? Huh, from Wis[s]e Words, eh? And so, really, sort of, from Kip Manley at Long Story, Short Pier. Funny things, webs.

Now I’m going to note this comics blog, got to by way of http://www.whiterose.org/dr.elmo/blog/, by way of the recommended links at http://www.cloggie.org/wissewords/, who I found in the Linchinography at http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/. Uh-huh. Partly I’m noting them as examples to myself of things I ought to syndicate in Shrook, to remind myself how much I need to get Shrook organized better. A comics category? (Honestly I don’t care all that much about comics, but I care enough to skim feeds, don’t I?)

MPH is posting on the workflow thing, which catches my attention big-time, but the logistics, dang. What to do? How to do it? I’ve been bound in kludges! I’m a slave to the known! Sometimes it works!

Bah. People who know how to do stuff need to take time to show others how to do it. MPH is good at this, he posts in detail about what he knows, but presence would be better. Maybe some of the small community of Mac folks could sit around for an hour or two—at Sven’s?—every so often—seasonally?—and go over tips and shortcuts they’ve picked up. For example, I think MPH is OmniWebbing now, and he could talk about advantages and disadvantages and so forth. Sven’s been doing animation, I’ve seen Gretchin and Leopoldo do nifty tricks like logging on remotely to their systems from mine, and I . . . well, I know what a blind carbon copy is? I must know something, anyhow. Point is, we should designate a time to share what we know. Pronto, since other folks seem to know a whole lot I don’t, as yet.

Doubtless their Columbia connections bias their scholarship somehow and I’ve been biased too, but this list still blows me away. Much of what I know about the past, about literature especially, I derived from books by these people, particularly Hadas, Trilling, Highet, and Barzun.