wet and dry and vocabulary
Apr. 6th, 2006 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacTuesday I went looking for the score of a difficult piece of modernism being played at a concert I was reviewing the following evening. Thanks to the miracle of online catalogs, I found that there were two copies in the area, and the nearer one was at UC Santa Cruz. So over the hill I drove, sopping wet all the way. Rocks - the "falling rocks" of sign and story - lay on the road over the hill in awkward places.
Meanwhile the UCSC library is being constructed on and the walkway I normally use appeared to be inaccessible. So I parked in a totally different area which was actually closer to the building but also more crowded. Walk walk, wet wet, trees trees, there it is: library library.
Score successfully retrieved and photocopied (chamber music is short), I headed down to a little Chinese restaurant, possibly the best in town, nearly blank-faced on the outside but opulent on the inside. Lunch was good, but I'd forgotten that they charge $2.50 for a pot of tea. Ouch, but I needed the tea. Warm wetness on the inside to counter cold wetness outside.
Wednesday and Thursday I was busy all day but after dinner today I stepped outside to retrieve something from my car and found the weather so nice I decided to take a stroll on the new nearby creek-walk. To read as I walked (what, don't tell me you don't do this too), I took along something I'd grabbed on a whim at the public library, Tom Wicker's "Penguin Lives" study of Poppy Bush. From it I learned a useful word. Wicker refers to one of Bush's speeches as being full of bomfog, and explains in a footnote:
Meanwhile the UCSC library is being constructed on and the walkway I normally use appeared to be inaccessible. So I parked in a totally different area which was actually closer to the building but also more crowded. Walk walk, wet wet, trees trees, there it is: library library.
Score successfully retrieved and photocopied (chamber music is short), I headed down to a little Chinese restaurant, possibly the best in town, nearly blank-faced on the outside but opulent on the inside. Lunch was good, but I'd forgotten that they charge $2.50 for a pot of tea. Ouch, but I needed the tea. Warm wetness on the inside to counter cold wetness outside.
Wednesday and Thursday I was busy all day but after dinner today I stepped outside to retrieve something from my car and found the weather so nice I decided to take a stroll on the new nearby creek-walk. To read as I walked (what, don't tell me you don't do this too), I took along something I'd grabbed on a whim at the public library, Tom Wicker's "Penguin Lives" study of Poppy Bush. From it I learned a useful word. Wicker refers to one of Bush's speeches as being full of bomfog, and explains in a footnote:
The acronym reporters devised for frequent references in Nelson Rockefeller's speeches to the "brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God." Gradually "bomfog" came to stand for any passage of supposedly uplifting - especially religious - rhetoric.Speaking of rhetoric, an annual package came today: a collection of photocopies of academic articles I shall need to summarize for next year's "Year's Work in Tolkien Studies," covering 2004. From the look of these, it appears that literary study of Jackson's films really took off in 2004, and I shall have to decide how many of these to cover. (If the article sheds any light on Tolkien's book I generally do.) Also common, comparative papers on reader and critical reaction to LOTR and Harry Potter, also often inspired by the competing film series, sigh. My favorite paper so far, a short case analysis and psychiatric diagnosis of Gollum by six medical students who clearly, but unusually for medical students, had too much time on their hands.
