Month: August 2007

I’m reading, among other things, Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue. He writes:

The new settlers in America obviously had to come up with new words to describe their New World, and this necessity naturally increased as they moved inland. Partly this was achieved by borrowing from others who inhabited or explored the untamed continent. From the Dutch we took landscape, cookie, and caboose. We may also have taken Yankee, as a corruption of the Dutch Jan Kees (“John Cheese”). The suggestion is that Jan Kees was a nonce name for a Dutchman in America, rather like John Bull for an Englishman, but the historical evidence is slight.

I find this interesting because, as it happens, John Cleese‘s father’s surname reportedly was “Cheese” before he joined the British Army in 1915, and his son could have easily been John Cheese.

An interesting observation in today’s Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1977 that Voyager 2 was launched by NASA to explore the planets of our solar system….It’s the birthday of a man who would have shuddered at the thought of the Voyager missions into space: H.P. [Howard Phillips] Lovecraft.

Keillor also notes that Lovecraft’s “work had a big influence on Stephen King,” but I think that’s probably an over-simplification, if not maybe even misleading. It’s unclear how much a real debt King’s work owes to Lovecraft, and, as
I’ve noted here before, King will be the first to point out some of the real weaknesses in Lovecraft’s work.

But, still, in honor of the man: The Dream-Quest of Pooh Corner.

Linkpharm:

  • Feeling nostalgic for old British sitcoms you’ve never heard of? Then try TV Comedy Classics. These are obscure enough that I’m wondering not just about the “classic” or “comedy” part, but also whether these were ever on TV. [via]
  • The next time you’re at the ballpark and your favorite player hits one into the stands, think before you try to catch it: it could be taxable income in your hands there. [via]
  • Want to travel out of state or to a national park? You soon might need a passport for that. [via]
  • Wondering what Cormac McCarthy’s Toy Story 3 might look like? Ruben Bolling shows all. It’s funny, but the use of commas is pretty liberal by McCarthy’s standards. [via]
  • I’ll admit, I haven’t actually read all of Adam Gopnik’s piece on Philip K. Dick in The New Yorker, but passages like “Since genre writing can support only one genius at a time — and no genre writer ever becomes just a good writer; it’s all prophet or all hack — the guy is usually resented by his peers and their partisans even as the establishment hails him. No one hates the rise of Elmore Leonard so much as a lover of Ross Macdonald.” are more than a little worrisome. [via]