Hibernation may well be ending...
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Friday, November 27, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
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
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
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
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
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!
