Monday January 13, 2014  The American Name Society's personal name of the year is "Francis."

***Got my contribution off to LinkOnline (email writing workshop) two days before the deadline.  

***Comments of comment:

Carol Kennedy, 1/13/14:  "Did [Annie] Dillard not think that a nonfiction writer might have 'lying eyes'? I would sooner trust my own lying eyes than someone else's."

Note that this was someone's years-old recollection of what Annie Dillard said.  Not a fresh direct quotation.

Lee Gold, 1/12/14:  "We went to Japan for four months with only a little prep (enough to read katakana, having seen Chushingura) and continued reading up on Japanese culture and studying the language while we were there (and Barry was working as a programmer).  We were sure we didn't understand as much as we could have but that we understood a lot more than tourists (or Barry's co-workers) who didn't know Japanese and hadn't read about Japanese history.

"We were based in Tokyo.  I don't know where Don Fitch stayed.

"We'd eaten Japanese food in LA.  It was a surprise to find donburi only available at a stadium, sort of like corn dogs in the US.  We found sushi at many price levels (cheap at department store restaurants, more expensive at nice restaurants, yet more expensive at fancier restaurants) August through November.  It was a surprise to find that sukiyaki was a very fancy food, cooked bite by bite by someone who knelt beside you -- at a fancy restaurant (and we didn't find it at a cheap restaurant).  We got used to surprises.

"Barry got $35/day per diem (because previous employees had eaten steak and drunk Scotch) plus a free hotel room, laundry, and subway pass, and we lived on that, not depositing his salary checks till we got home.  The per diem even paid for a week's vacation trip to Kyoto."

Do you think consciously in:
Words?
Pictures?
Movies?
Visual diagrams?
Non-visual diagrams?
Something else?

***"That hilarious moment when a black talk show host gives DNA results to a white supremacist, 'Hey Bro!'"
....
"The studio audience laughed while Goddard, who is a black woman, told him the news that genetically he is 14 per cent Sub Saharan African, 86 per cent European, which Cobb promptly dismissed as 'statistical noise.'"
http://preview.tinyurl.com/n4hxjqb
Via Wolf Bro on Facebook

The figure I've seen for White Americans with nonwhite ancestry is 20 percent.  However, I suspect this assumes all European immigrants have been of pure White ancestry.

***From Twitter:

Ben Zimmer ‏@bgzimmer My latest for @lexiconvalley: Batman bin Suparman Arrested on Drug Charges. Here's How He Got His Name. http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/11/11/batman_indonesian_man_with_superhero_name_runs_afoul_of_the_law.html

Political Animal ‏@politic_animal In debate on probation, Richard Drax MP suggesting replacing the Border Agency with a 'militaristic' organisation of conscripted offenders.
Retweeted by Moonbootica

Political Animal ‏@politic_animal They would apparently, use the armed forces' cast-off ships and aeroplanes to patrol the borders. Quite frankly, I'm a bit scared.
Retweeted by Moonbootica

Deep-fried Sashimi 10/05/13  Dan Goodman, 1720 Como Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414.  dsgood at iphouse.com or at gmail.com.  612-298-2354

Saturday October 5, 2013 It’s clear that Bryce was conceived in Dallas. But Jocelyn and Paige were conceived in New York City (in the borough of Manhattan). However, neither of those place names seemed to work as baby names, so Ron and Cheryl [Howard] went with the name of the swanky hotel where the twins were conceived: The Carlyle. Using that logic, Reed’s middle name should have been Volvo, but that car brand didn’t work as a baby name either, so the Howards went with the name of the quiet street on which the Volvo was parked in Greenwich, Connecticut: Cross Street. (If you’ve never heard of that "celebrity lovers’ lane" before, you’re not alone.)
http://babynamesinthenews.com/2013/09/19/names-that-reflect-where-the-baby-was-conceived/

Via tweet from Bruce Lansky.

Note:  Subscribing to baby name Twitter accounts got me suggestions of pregnancy and baby supplies accounts.

***From Twitter:
wwwtxt (1988–94) ‏@wwwtxt
If the Apple II ever dies, I'd be really surprised. Nearly one out of every ten Apple computers in the world is a IIgs. 89MAR

Future Crimes ‏@FutureCrimes
“@mbgrinberg: Predictive Policing: The Role of Crime Forecasting in LE Operations http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR233.html#.UlBNJiCTBVM.twitter … via @RANDCorporation

Friday July 19, 2013  Reread:  Melissa Scott, Conceiving the Heavens:  creating the science fiction novel.  Heinemann (Reed Elsevier), 1997.

There are reminders of how much the world can change in less than twenty years.  One example given of future possibilities is electronic currency.  Today, BitCoin is old news.  (And generated in a way Scott didn't predict.  I don't think anyone else predicted it, either.)

Then there are references to such things as library card catalogs.

This time through, I noticed an unintended story idea in the glossary:  "A relatively new wrinkle is the collaboration between two writers, one living and one dead."  Suppose the dead writer is still active, or again active....

Highly recommended.

***From Google Plus:
Robbie Taylor
Shared publicly
 #Lovecraft

You have to make a SAN check before driving through...
Andrea Bonazzi originally shared:

H.P. Lovecraft Square.
Providence council names intersection after HP Lovecraft
http://www.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/content/20130717-