ABN AMRO have come up with a boring version of stuff I and another gent were trying to get an extremely boring software company to embark on ten years ago. Back then the thing was to generate structure, content and views dynamically, which was neither particularly difficult nor costly but which didn’t chime in with…
Would the benefits of a link have outweighed the risks of getting clobbered toute suite by Go Daddy activists? Probably not, so this counts as a favour.
The guys Geoff Pullum is looking for are http://www.translationgold.com/–just google the phrase and check the source of the result pages. The priority audience for their translations seems to be machines rather than humans and their primary aim is to boost Google rankings for pages written in the original language. Since you can achieve the same…
MMcM at Polyglot Vegetarian (via Transblawg) is rightly surprised that the latest OED update only manages to take portobello mushrooms back to 1990. They appear in 1989 in Bruno Ellmer’s Classical and Contemporary Italian Cooking for Professionals and in the 1942 edition of Agriculture Decisions, a publication by the US Dept of Agriculture, which is…
Not many people know this, but apparently (background) he went up to his host Patijn and demanded something that better reflected France’s phenomenal contribution to European society. “What kind of thing had you got in mind?” asked the mayor. “Well,” said Chirac, who had noted with envy the PR points scored by Mitterrand with the…
Dave has kindly sent me the URL of the online version of a superb book packed with brilliant photos, The story of the Tour de France by Bill and Carol McGann, who in their spare time run Torelli, a Californian racing gear import business. Dave liked the blinding of Honoré Barthélémy story quoted in the…
Thinking about the origins of exclusivity, various biblical suggestions as to how to deal with idolaters spring to mind like a gazelle in wellington boots: Exodus 34 12 Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst…
Via GBS, from Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal for January to June 1844, where the original is attributed to the Emperor Trajan: Let Dick one summer’s day expose Before the sun his monstrous nose, And stretch his giant mouth, to cause Its shade to fall upon his jaws, With nose so long and mouth so wide, And…