…but we already have 12 Star Trek Gadgets from the 24th Century
John Brandon tells you about them at Mental Floss.
Wikimedia Commons
On the original series, Kirk and crew carried handheld communicators. But in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Starfleet personnel wore communicator badges on the left breasts of their uniforms. A California start-up called Vocera has created a similar device you pin to your shirt. They’re used mostly in hospitals to avoid having constant overhead pages.
See all the StarTrek gadgets HERE
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It means WHAT?
Every language has some untranslatable words, my mother tongue included.
In Serbian, ‘inat’ means so much more than the simple translation of the word. In the simplest terms, it maps onto “stubbornness” – but it goes beyond that, to “I’m digging my heels in and this is where I stand, for good or ill, against all comers” or “DON’T tell me what I can’t do!” or, somewhat more metaphysically, “Yeah? you and what army?”
The word is a foundational one for the mindset and the culture, a never-say-die thing that has kept us alive through centuries of historical EVENTS that have rolled over us. It’s a survival thing, sometimes harsh and unlovely but always solid and strong and only getting stronger in the face of adversity.
Which brings us to:
The Illustrated Book Of Untranslatable Words
Last year Maptia.com published a blog post titled ‘11 Untranslatable Words From Other Cultures’ with illustrations by Ella Sanders, 19, who was interning with them in Morocco. The next morning they woke to a torrent of emails and tweets from thousands upon thousands of people who had commented, shared, or volunteered more suggestions for these untranslatables.
A year later, Ella Sanders’ book was published by Random House.
Tsundoku—Japanese | The tsundoku scale can range from just one unread book to a serious hoard, so you are most likely guilty of it. Illustration by Ella Sanders
Komorebi—Japanese | It may be temporarily blinding but it’s most definitely beautiful. There is something wonderfully evocative and uniquely magical about sunlight filtered through green foliage. Illustration by Ella Sanders
Read more about Ella HERE
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Who made Shakespeare?
The creation of William Shakespeare: How the Bard really became a legend
Shakespeare wasn’t always a literary icon — or even the most popular writer of his era, Cameron Hunt McNabb tells us at Salon.
Shakespeare’s current status is often described as “bardolatry,” an excessive veneration of the man marked by elaborate myths about who he was and what he really accomplished. One of the more popular myths involves Shakespeare’s “wildly extensive” vocabulary and ferocious knack for coining new words. (In reality, Shakespeare’s vocabulary was less than half of the average person’s today and he only coined 229 new words, coming in 4th among English wordsmiths.)
So how did he get so big? Well, there were three things…
Read the article HERE
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Daniel Dalton of BuzzFeed selects the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction that killed it this year. Ranked in no particular order.
e.g.
Station Eleven: “Emily St. John Mandel’s time-hopping tale of a worldwide epidemic, postapocalyptic Shakespearian thespians, the problematic nature of fame, and the importance of art, love, and companionship when it comes to survival is an incredible feat of a novel.” – Isaac Fitzgerald
Read the article HERE
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Welcome to winter. The fox is heart crushing.
When Mother Nature unleashes a cold front, she often freezes everything in her path, creating the most incredible scenes.
The 30 Most Amazing Photos Of Frozen Things You’ll Ever See
Frozen Lake Michigan Light House
Photo Credits: EliteDaily,
See all the photos HERE
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All I want for Christmas is …
…books, of course. If you are a book lover too and looking for a good fantasy, let me introduce you to Random, the first book in The Were Chronicles.
I have put up a page for the series HERE which includes a link to an excerpt from the first chapter of Random.
The ebook version is out now, of course, but if you want to give a Paperback for Christmas, you can pre-order it from the publisher Dark Quest Books HERE and slip a note into your loved one’s stocking that the book is on its way.
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THIS ‘n THAT
“Merriam-Webster names ‘culture’ word of the year“
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“Buy Every Book You Read Next Year from a Bookshop”
“I claim to love books; and, more than that, to love bookshops. Yet for eight years I have poured money into a company that many booksellers regard as the greatest threat to their survival…. It is the time of year to make resolutions. You could resolve to eat less, or jog more. Or you could join me in making a simple pledge: to buy every book you read next year from a bookshop. I don’t know about you, but Amazon has had quite enough of my money already.” ~ Laura Freeman in a piece for the Daily Mail
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Third Place Books, which has stores in Lake Forest Park, Wash., and in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle, is opening a third store, in the Seward Park neighborhood of Seattle, in late 2015.
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Quote of the Day
“True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.” ~Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Alma Alexander My books Email me
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