Are these not the finest opening words ever written for an engineering document — maybe for any work of literature? Be it known that I, Luther C. Barcus, of the town of Sidney, county of Champaign, and State of Illinois, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Monkey-Wrenches… That’s the beginning of the patent (US number 753837) […]
Tag: literature
An interim report about the report about reports about reports
The winner of the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for literature has issued an update — a relatively short interim report — about progress on the report about its prize-winning report about reports about reports. That prize was awarded to The US Government General Accountability Office [US GAO], for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends […]
The more-than-seven ages of man (and woman)
William Shakespeare reduced the ages of man to a mere seven, in the play “As You Like It“. In this video, actor Benedict Cumberbatch presents that argument: In contrast, the maker of the video below went for a less literarily — but more mathematically — classical approach to age, assigning a different age for each year […]
The ubiquity of dead mules in Southern literature
Jerry Leath Mills [pictured here] reigns as the unchallenged authority on the subject of dead mules in 20th-century American southern literature. Professor Mills established his reputation – almost instantly – in 1996, with the publication of a long essay called “Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature of the Twentieth Century”. […]