Entries from January 2009

January 28, 2009

Sentinelese Liberation Army

On a tiny island in the Indian Ocean live a people who have never heard of Patty Hearst or the Symbionese Liberation Army. The island is North Sentinel Island, and the people are known in English as the Sentinelese. While their island, part of the Andaman Archipelego, is nominally controlled by India, the [...]

January 18, 2009

Curiously Excited

The word “interrobang” just rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it‽ This funny bit of punctuation (a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, aka an interrogative mark and a bang in typographical lingo) was invented in 1962 by Martin Speckter, editor of the magazine Type Talk and head of “a New [...]

January 17, 2009

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Moses Harmon

At the age of 75, Moses Harmon had spent much of his life fighting for the rights of women and for freedom of speech. For these efforts, Harmon was sentenced to one year of hard labor in Joliet (the same prison that John Belushi was released from in Blues Brothers.) Unlike “Joliet” Jake [...]

January 13, 2009

Useless Word of the Moment: Zenzizenzizenzic

This beautiful oddity comes by way of Michael Quinon’s World Wide Words.  Coined by the Welsh mathametician Robert Recorde in his 1557 work The Whetstone of Witte, it means the eighth power of a number.  So the zenzizenzizenzic of 2 would be 256.  This word, which would have made of Lewis Carroll (of Jabberwocky fame) [...]

January 4, 2009

Fish Heads, Fischer, and Other Musical Anomalies

If you’ve never seen the glory that is “Fish Heads,” you should probably watch it now. This delightful little music video was made by Bill Paxton (who directed, produced, and starred in it) and the oddball band Barnes and Barnes. Barnes and Barnes consists of Bill Mumy (of Lost [...]