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Another quick note

Bristle 3 is out.

one of the first few books printed

The book is written in an artificial language, which uses Italian grammar with words drawn from Latin, Tuscan and Greek, many of them totally made up, with Italian endings. There are also eighty epigrams and inscriptions, in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, mock hieroglyphs and ‘Chaldean’. It is the work of a cryptomaniac. Astonishingly HP has been translated into english, in part in 1592 (only a third of it), and in full in 1999 by an American academic, Joscelyn Godwin, Professor of Music at Colgate University, Hamilton, NY.

...

weirdly, the book’s erotic content is expressed most powerfully through buildings, which form a series of stages for the action. Indeed, buildings take up more than half the book, and no fewer than seventy-eight of the first eighty-six pages are descriptions of buildings or gardens. of the 172 engravings, eighty-eight are of buildings.

of:

“one of the craziest, most beautiful books ever printed”

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

(Poliphilo’s Struggle for Love in a Dream)

“nothing less than an architectural erotic fantasy”

(by anonymous - possibly one Brother Francesco Colonna)

page 228 & 230

The Gutenberg Revolution

by John Man

bantam books

isbn 978-0-55381-966-3

relative

“the relatively easily attainable temperature of 19 Kelvin.”

excerpt from “Sci/Tech: A Fifth State of Matter”

reported by Mathias Biilmann Christensen

Bits of News

Thursday, 28 September 2006

A hard part of writing is getting published

as Tolkien might have discovered these days...

Ages gone by

1

Many ages ago, it was common, I find

For dumb creatures to talk just as well as mankind:

Birds and Beasts met together t’arrange their affairs;

Nay! the Frogs of the day, must needs give themselves airs,

And apeing their betters, not pleas’d with their station,

talk’d of having a King to rule over their Nation.

2

In these curious days, it did raise no surprise

(though now t’would make ev’ry one open their eyes)

that three Bears, very sick of their woods and their den

should fancy a home ‘mongst the dwellings of men;

So not caring a fig for what anyone said,

they brought a large house already furnished

opening of “the story of the three bears”

Eleanor Mure

1831

(possibly the first printed version of ‘Goldilocks and the three bears’.)

NB - In this historical variant there is no Goldilocks - but an old lady neighbour - who breaks in after being refused entry. She doesn’t sleep in the beds - but hides in a wardrobe when the bears return - who upon her discovery throw her in the fire but she doesn’t burn and then drown her in water but she doesn’t drown!

Update from Scotland

Glasgow is the "laziest city in the UK" according to the findings of a national health poll. Researchers questioned 2,049 people during May for the not-for-profit organisation, Nuffield Health. About 75% of Glaswegians who responded admitted they failed to exercise at least three times a week. This figure was 67% for people from Birmingham and Southampton, with London just behind on 66%, Bristol on 64% and Leeds and Newcastle on 62%.
The survey also suggested that some Britons were so lazy they would rather watch a television programme they do not like than get out of their chair to change channels. About one in six people questioned said if their remote control was broken, they would continue watching the same channel rather than get up. More than one third of those questioned, 36%, said they would not run to catch a bus. Of the 654 respondents with children, 64% said they were often too tired to play with them. This led the report to conclude that it was "no wonder" one in six UK children was classified as obese before they start school. Of the 456 dog owners quizzed, more than half (52%) said they could not be bothered to walk their pet. Three-quarters (73%) of people said they regularly have too little energy at the end of the day for passion with their partner.
Dr Sarah Dauncey of Nuffield Health said, "If we don't start to take control of this problem, a whole generation will become too unfit to perform even the most rudimentary of tasks."

(I know there's already a lot of info circulating on this subject, everyone's heard it all before, but I found this series of questions and answers particularly touching/tragic - a city where fat kids and fat dogs are left to languish in corners while sexless, passionless people watch TV shows they don't enjoy)