taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Quinn posted a link to a nifty CGI by Aaron Swartz which detects uses of common cliches, with the list of cliches to avoid taken from the Associated Press Guide to News Writing. In addition, she also mentioned there’s the Passivator, ‘a passive verb and adverb flagger for Mozilla-derived browsers, Safari, and Opera 7.5′.

Combining the two, I’ve hacked together a bookmarklet version of the cliche finder — it can be found on this page. (Couldn’t place it inline into this post due to stupid over-aggressive Markdown, grr.)

Fun! Probably not IE-compatible, though.

Tags: bookmarklets, cliches, english, grammar, hacks, javascript, writing

Food: For some damn reason, it’s impossible to get pork sausages here in southern CA. The only good ones I’ve had were at the Cat and Fiddle, an english pub in LA, who do really kick-ass all-day UK-style breakfasts.

However, it’s been a while since I’ve been up there, and I’ve got a fierce hankering for a dacent brekkie — one featuring sossies, rashers, and black pudding. However, some asking around has pointed me to FoodIreland.com, which has a fine range of proper food — including what is recognisably a Full Irish Breakfast! (some readers may note the similarities to breakfasts in parts of the UK, but I’ll insist on calling it a ‘Full Irish’, thank you very much.)

It also does Proper Tea (heavy on the Assam tips), Marmite, crisps and Jammie Dodgers. Quality!

But there are a couple of minor nits — first off, it’s excruciatingly expensive. But money’s no object where a dacent brekkie is involved. Secondly, Lynx deodorant — WTF? People are willing to pay extra for that stuff? And most importantly of all — where are the King Crisps!?

Tags: brekkie, dacent, english, fiddle, food, full, pork, pub, reason, uk-style, while

Politics: Living With Caucasians – a journal (in English) from Tbilisi, Georgia, which is living in interesting times right now.

Tags: caucasians, english, journal, politics

Living With Caucasians – a journal (in English) from Tbilisi, Georgia, which is living in interesting times right now.

Tags: caucasians, english, journal

Patents: Slashdot gets a lot of stick for cluelessness. Now and again, though, you find well-presented arguments you won’t read elsewhere. Try these:

An excellent summary of James Burke’s book, The Day the Universe Changed; I haven’t read it, but it sounds good. Reportedly, there’s a section covering a period in British history when patent law was extended to cover 100 years; ‘Like copyright today a person could not extend on a process developed on the day of their birth – they and their children (and even many of their grandchildren) would be dead long before the patent expired.’

Meanwhile, Germany refused to respect these terms, and their industry flourished — ‘a backwards agrarian society became an industrial powerhouse that far exceeded the capabilities of the British industry they ’stole’ from, within a working lifetime.’

Details of how Lowell, Massachusetts became an industrial-era milling powerhouse through the US ’stealing’ British patents: ‘an English immigrant, Samuel Slater … had worked his way up from apprentice to overseer in an English factory using the Arkwright system. Drawn by American bounties for the introduction of textile technology, he passed as a farmer and sailed for America with details of the Arkwright water frame committed to memory.’

Games: GameChronicles on the GTA:VC – Scarface connection. A nice summary of all (or at least, most) of the Scarface homages in the game.

Tags: arkwright, day, english, industry, lot, patent, patents, powerhouse, scarface, slashdot, summary

“There’s even dialects of ‘english’ military jargon. An ex-general giving analysis on Sky (TV) commented that during the last Gulf War, confusion was caused because when a US commander said they’d ‘cleared’ a town they meant they’d gone past it, but when a british commanders said he’d ‘cleared’ a town he meant he’d dealt with most pockets of enemey and there was no signifigant resitence left in it and it was now ’safe’ for occupation.

The two confusions caused american comanders to wonder what a british comander was still doing in a town he’d said he’d ‘cleared’, and british troops wondering who the hell was shooting at them out of towns the americans had said they’d ‘cleared’.” (via Barbara Barrett on the forteana list)

Tags: analysis, british, commander, confusion, english, giving, gulf, jargon, town, war

Good article at the Guardian, on what J. R. R. Tolkien would have made of the movie:

Why, he would have asked in despair, has his quintessentially English shire been turned into an outstation of Riverdance? “I do know Celtic things and feel for them a certain distaste. They are in fact ‘mad’,” he wrote in an untypically snotty letter in 1937. So why do the hobbits do Irish jigs at Bilbo Baggins’ birthday party?

Why are two of the hobbits in the fellowship, Merry and Pippin, cast as prat-falling Irish clowns? Why does Howard Shore’s music break into repeated Irish warbling? Because, as he would dolefully have guessed, James Cameron’s Titanic proved that dollops of Irishry play well with the US box office.

Well, I think I’ll be with JRR on that one then. begorrah.

Tags: article, celtic, despair, distaste, english, guardian, movie, outstation, riverdance, shire

The Enigma story, and the misattributions of credit:

In U-571, Hollywood gave the credit for the Enigma code-cracking heroics of World War Two to the Americans. In the British thriller Enigma, out today, the praise is given to the English. Now, if a protest from the Polish embassy in London is to be believed, it was the Poles that done it after all.

From what I’ve read, the Polish cryptographers are certainly missing out on a lot of the credit they’re rightly due.

Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 12:29:35 +0100
From: “Tim Chapman” (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: UK accused of movie history revisionism

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Exclusive/0,4029,559785,00.html

Enigma deepens as Poles claim code-cracking breakthrough

Friday September 28, 2001

In U-571, Hollywood gave the credit for the Enigma code-cracking heroics of world war two to the Americans. In the British thriller Enigma, out today, the praise is given to the English. Now, if a protest from the Polish embassy in London is to be believed, it was the Poles that done it after all. The statement claims that Polish intelligence experts captured the Enigma machine on which the Germans conducted all their most secret cipher traffic before the war had even begun, and later presented this to the Allied forces. The statement quotes a Professor M.R.D. Foot as claiming that: “The most important service the Poles ever rendered to the anti-Nazi cause was something they did before the war had even begun.” An accompanying missive from the Federation of Poles in Great Britain adds that: “Mathematicians of the Polish Intelligence Service were the first to
break the Enigma code. In July 1939 passed over to British Intelligence a copy of the Enigma machine and the fruits of their work done in breaking the code in the years 1932-1939. This work greatly assisted the Bletchley Park code breakers and contributed to the Allied victory in world war two.” The Polish authorities are particularly annoyed with Enigma’s depiction of a traitorous Polish officer at Bletchley Park, the wartime headquarters of code-cracking intelligence, who works as a spy for the Nazis. The statement insists that no Pole ever worked at Bletchley Park. “Obviously we feel that this is a gratuitous slur on Poles who fought side by side with their British allies.”

———————— Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ———————~–> FREE COLLEGE MONEY CLICK HERE to search 600,000 scholarships! http://us.click.yahoo.com/ujOgTC/4m7CAA/ySSFAA/7gSolB/TM ———————————————————————~->

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: (spam-protected)

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Tags: code, credit, english, enigma, intelligence, praise, protest, thriller, war, world