Friday Round Up

On the way to work this morning I heard George Benson's Breezin'. Oh, does this take me back. It so reminds me of riding around with Mon on beautiful days with the radio blaring and some nice beverages to drink. Mon, if you are reading this, there aren't too many days that go by when I don't think of you and all of the fun we had so long ago. There's always a song on the radio, your beloved tiger lilies, or something or someone that reminds me of you. You and Gran, my two kindred spirits.

As wonderful as I feel online library catalogs are, I still miss the look and feel of the old card catalogs. You know those wonderful wooded boxes with all of the cool drawers and all of those wonderful informational cards. If are artistic and have a love for nostalgia you might want to participate in Cartalog.

Cartalog is a wonderful idea that comes from the staff at the University of Iowa Libraries. They retired their card catalog in 2004 and have come up with a wonderful idea to give the actual cards a rebirth. I spent a long time in the gallery and it is amazing how creative people are.

I don't have a recollection of studying much Greek or Roman history when I was in school. I know a few of the main players from those times, but I am totally stymied by others. Not any more. I can just go to the handy-dandy Who Was Who in Roman Times site and look up folks like Crassus, who died in a particuarly terrible way and Numa Pompilius. My one complaint about this site would be that they might have used a little bigger font for their text.

I have always been fascinated with accents. I am annoyed by some American accents and so as not to insult anyone I wont' say what accents they are, but I think it's so interesting that you can be from two different parts of the same state and say the same word differently. The Speech Accent Archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers. You will need the Quicktime plug-in to listen. Hours and hours of fun.

For those of you who observe Easter or Passover have a nice holiday.

Instead of a quote or poem I thought I would leave you with a little visual poetry.