Branko's Weblog

Met myn zwaard.
Op m’n paard.
En myn helm op het hoofd.
Er op in! En den vyand den schedel gekloofd,
En vooruit!

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III. The first history lesson

In the first lesson I intended to explain what makes Russia differ from other countries, on what it borders and how it is governed. I wanted to tell who ruled at the moment and when the Czar had ascended the throne.

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For this, our national and rather outdoorsy holiday, rain had been predicted. But although it was very windy, and at times chilly, there was sunshine most of the day.

I acquired 20 books (that’s approximately 160 square meter or 1600 square feet of pages); 11 for myself, 7 for Project Gutenberg, and 2 for a friend. The books weigh over 6 kg, and include 4 comics. I’ve paid 11 euro for 16 of them; 4 came at the end of the day and were free.

No real finds, although I will be glad to re-acquaint myself with Lord of the Flies, a book I like despite the fact that it was an obligatory read in high school.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18016

Edit: OK, let’s translate a bit. The title means In Vulcan’s Empire, and the subtitle, De Uitbarsting van Krakatau en hare Gevolgen means The Eruption of the Krakatoa and its Consequences.

But from Java’s mountains death shows you its grin more eloquently; it is not the death of the far future, when the ice queen will have conquered even the jungle, but death as it arrives on the battlefield, suddenly, by enemy fire. Because Java is one huge artillery park.

They are not just mountains as they rise from the earth, spread over the entire island, but also active volcanoes. Fifty firebreathing mountains aim their peaks at the sky, all recognisable by that peculiar shape that is unique to volcanoes. You can go nowhere on Java without being covered by these mortars. This is Vulcan’s empire. Java is only four times the size of the Netherlands. Imagine the consequence: imagine that the Netherlands had seven active volcanoes!

“In rejecting hatred I should have shown myself a traitor to love.”

Belgian literary Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck in his 1916 preface to his collection of essays “The Wrack of the Storm“, on why he cannot write objectively about Germans while they are defiling his country.

The responses to the European Commission’s consultation on digital libraries (and related subjects such as orphan works) have been posted on its website. Among the respondents are libraries, museums, accessibility groups, publishers, software houses, and private persons such as li’l ole me.

Edit 4 June 2006: adapted this review to the hReview microformat.

As I wrote earlier, I was going to read Bramah and Sheckley over Christmas, which I have. I also suggested that Bramah’s Kai Lung may have influenced Terry Pratchett; but I read a book from that other series of Ernest Bramah, so I won’t be able to compare the authors. Yet.

Max Carrados is yet another soldier in that large army of super-detectives that was so popular during the late 19th and early 20th century: Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Hercule Poirot, The Thinking Machine, Bill Clifford, and of course the granddaddy of them all, Dupin.

The four Carrados stories are neither better nor worse than their contemporaries. If anything, the story type is starting to grate a little. Still, great escapist stuff.

Max Carrados is, like Poirot and Holmes claim to be, a consulting detective. They listen to your story, and then, solely based on what you told them, the mud on the gold watch you inherited from your father and the fact that the queen’s stable boy has a cold, solve your “case” using nothing but deduction. Carrados is “aided,” so to speak, by his losing sight in his younger years, sharpening his deductive facilities. (Father Brown’s deductive facilities are aided by extreme bigotry.)

Ernest Bramah, Four Max Carrados Detective Stories, 6/10.

(Bill Clifford, by the way, is like Sherlock Holmes a parody of these types of detectives, written by Dutchman Godfried Bomans, and unfortunately won’t return to the public domain for a long time to come.)

Currently making the rounds at Distributed Proofreaders is Cotgrave’s “Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues“.

- In the category They Have A Word For That?
Empiné: m. ée: f. Turned into a Pine tree.
Dessonger. To breake off sleepe with a snort, or start; to awake out of a dreame, starting.
Ichthyophagie: f. Fish-eating.
Icosaëdre. One of the fiue regular bodies in Geometrie; consists of twentie equiangle triangles.
Cacochymie: f. Euill disgestion; or, ill iuyce in the bodie.
Grumer. To shite grapes; or, to void a dung that shewes the dunguer to haue eaten grapes; (a word applyed most vnto wild Swine.)

- In the category No British Word For.
Estrindore. A kind of Brittish daunce. ¶Rab.

- In the category Ducks.
Estonnez comme canes. Dismayed like so manie Ducks.

- From the category Speak English, Man!
Iargonneur: m. A chatter, gibridgemunger, counterfeit rogue that speakes fustian, or a language whiche either himselfe, or his hearers vnderstands not.

- In the category Proofreader Only Remembered The Definition. Vaguely.
???. a type of play wherein one person gave something into the keeping of another person who then lost it to yet another person through trickerie on behalf of the third person’s part.

- In the category Heed That Second Definition And Its Juxtaposition:
Camisade: f. A cold Pie; also, the thin filme, or skin, which inwraps a child in the bed, or after-birth.
Calamine: f. A certaine yellow minerall substance, which fire consumes, but melts not; mixed with copper, it changes it into a fine brasse, that lookes like gold; also, the heauier foyle of brasse, or copper; which comes of the sparkles, and smoake that arise from the furnace, and cleaue to the roofe, and vpper sides, of the house, wherein it is melted; also, a kind of apple.

And of course, we’re also processing “Queen Anna’s New World of Words”. Again, from the category They Have A Word For That?
Ador[ee]a, the glory and honour belonging to corne in generall.

Furthermore, we’re working on “Etymological Dictionary of the Scots Language”, which has, in the category Words That Need Introducin’ To The English Language:
Constable, s. A large glass, the contents of which he is obliged to drink, who has not drunk as much as the rest of the company.

And finally from the category I Have Seen So Many Of These Things I Forget Which Dictionary This One Is From. The first one doubles in the category Missing The Point By A Continent:
Atheists (if they think there be a God) haue good cause to thanke God, acknowledging his mercie toward them in sparing vs.
Pet de masson. A fart in syrop; the fart that brings durt after it.

Have a nice meal!

Some 1500 proverbs from the French dictionary have been translated in renaissance English at http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/proverbs/.

Kudos to all who posted these at the Distributed Proofreaders “Most amusing (or astonishing) text you’ve come across” forum topic.

Noodlot, by Louis Couperus (etext #17659), is the first book at Project Gutenberg that I have scanned. The title means “fate”, “destiny”. I have helped produce a lot of books for PG, hundreds probably, but this is the first one that I actually bought in a store or on a market, that I held in my hands, and that has now been digitized completely, so it is a little bit special for me.

I haven’t actually read it, though, so I cannot tell you what it is about. PG has Plain Vanilla Text (PVT) and HTML versions, and undoubtedly websites like Manybooks will have … drats! that’s fast … has it in many more formats.