Wednesday January 04, 2006; part of:
Nerdery
- I am delighted to find that there are clever people who waste their time even more spectacularly than I can. Language log is one of the blogs which does the work that some mailing lists used to do ten years ago. I had never thought it would provide a justification for the use of regular expressions.
- An unscientific survey of comparative religious fervour: an article about word processors in the Guardian has drawn at least 60 responses, not all published here. An article about cooking geese has drawn one. An article on the study of actual religious religions has so far had no response at all. Ditto the interview with James Lovelock. Yet in some moods I think that any of these subjects are more important than open source software.
Posted by andrewb at January 04, 2006 08:31 AM
Well, I did at least read the religious religions article, in deadtree format even. First Saturday Guardian in new format that I actually bought for money.
Sorry, I've only just now seen your Grauniad piece about goosecooking. If I count right there were five of you at dinner; and yet you managed to have half a goose left over?!
It wouldn't be a terrible thing were you to post the recipe for those pears.
Interesting way of dealing with the leftovers. Minus the goose, the dough you describe is very close to that used for the dumplings we served (which are quite different to the usual dumplings made from raw potatoes), though the dumplings are simmered not fried, and have a bit of nutmeg in place of the onions. But little fried potato-dumpling-dough sausages (again, normally without diced goose) are a very south German thing, called Schupfnudeln in cookery books, but never in real life (the people who make and eat them invariably call them Buabaspitzla, which we may translate roughly as 'little boys' willies', and if you ever see them you will know why).
Well, of the five people, the daughter won't eat goose and my mother doesn't, to a first approximation, eat anything at all.
Pears coming some time. They will make a change from theology.
Textile formatting works here. Double hyphens are automatically converted to en dashes, quotes are automatically smartened. You can put dashes and asterisks around text to make
italics bold and other silly effects easily.
- Text wrapped in Asterisks which * will be bold. The asterisks must touch each end of the bold text. There must a space before the first and after the last.
- Text wrapped in underscores - _ - will be italicised. The underscores must touch each end of the italics. There must a space before the first and after the last.
- Paragraphs starting bq. will be block quoted. There must be no space before the "b" and one space after the full stop.
- A hyperlink is made by wrapping the link text in double quotes, followed immediately by a colon, then the URL. If there is a question mark in the URL, wrap the whole lot in square brackets.
- I use two classes to mark up text that deserves it. sane text looks like this. loony text looks like that. The syntax for those is %(sane)[space] sane text %; loony is left as an exercise to the reader.
