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The General Point.

My name is Emily Wood. I live in San Francisco.
"It’s possible and necessary to be interested in everything." - Adrienne Rich
These are my own opinions and not those of my company. (Sigh.)

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Nov 06

via unburyingthelead:littlepotato:

q: what do you want to do most in the next two years?

a: hunt butterflies, especially certain whites, in the mountains of iran and in the middle atlas. quietly take up tennis again. have three new suits made in london. revisit landscapes and libraries in america. find a harder and darker pencil.

an interview with v. nabokov from here.

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Oct 28

This is really hilarious.

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Oct 26

» Owls So Cute, Who Cares If They're Wise? - The Picture Show Blog : NPR

Ashoke is trying to kill me. Check out slide 2.

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Oct 19

“ Betty, the show establishes, was in a sorority. So far, okay. Pretty, with a little-girl voice and a childlike, almost lobotomized affect; humorless; bland but at times creepily calculating (as when she seeks solace by manipulating her vulnerable friend into an affair); obsessed with appearances and therefore lacking in inner resources; a consistently cold and frequently vindictive mother; a daddy’s girl—Betty is written, and clumsily performed by model-turned-actress January Jones, as a clichéd shallow sorority sister. (Just as Don’s self-invented identity is Gatsby-like, so Betty, his wife, is a jejune ornament like Daisy, though without the voice full of money.) But she’s also a character deeply wronged by her serial-philanderer husband, and she’s hazily presented as a stultified victim of soulless postwar suburban ennui (now there’s a cliché). So, perhaps to bestow gravitas on her, or at least some upper-classiness, the show establishes that she went to Bryn Mawr. But of course Bryn Mawr has never had sororities. By far the brainiest of the Seven Sisters—cussed, straight-backed, high-minded, and feminist (its students, so the wags said, preferred the Ph.D. to the Mrs.)—Bryn Mawr was probably the least likely college that Betty Draper, given to such non-U genteelisms as “passed away,” would have attended. So much for satiric exactitude.

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Mad About Mad Men - The Atlantic (November 2009)

Food for thought.

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“ You may have noticed that we spell “theatre” the British way, reversing the “er” to “re,” and double consonants before suffixes (“travelled,” rather than “traveled”); we use the diaeresis in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect”; we prefer the serial comma; we spell out round numbers, even big ones. The copy editor does not make any interpretive changes.

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Copy Editing at The New Yorker Magazine. An Interview With Mary Norris | Red Room

Copy editor porn. Or perhaps “erotica” is more accurate considering it’s all in text. Whatever.

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Oct 16

» Owl in a box

needless to say, I find this awesome.

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Oct 14

I was talking about London yesterday and got nostalgic.

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“

The word on the table that morning was “cloud computing.”

To translate the English term for computing resources that can be accessed on demand on the Internet, a group of French experts had spent 18 months coming up with “informatique en nuage,” which literally means “computing in cloud.” France’s General Commission of Terminology and Neology — a 17-member group of professors, linguists, scientists and a former ambassador — was gathered in a building overlooking the Louvre to approve the term.

“What? This means nothing to me. I put a ‘cloud’ of milk in my tea!” exclaimed Jean Saint-Geours, a French writer and member of the Terminology Commission.

“Send it back and start again,” ordered Etienne Guyon, a physics professor on the commission.

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The French Get Lost in the Clouds Over a New Term in the Internet Age - WSJ.com

Hilarious.

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Oct 13

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Sep 23

And you people say San Francisco doesn’t have weather.

(via PT)

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