Archive for February, 1999
I've been a big fan of Willard R. Espy's books ever since I first encountered An Almanac of Words at Play, back in high school. I always meant to write him a letter thanking him for the books, and suggesting new material for any future ones he might write. But I never got around to […]
The characters of a writing system can be represented in many ways—not only in a variety of fonts and lettering styles, but in any agreed-upon symbolic form: as Braille letters, as flags in Semaphore, as hand-signs, or as strings of dots and dashes... Two weeks ago, Morse Code was officially retired as the language of […]
Scott Purdy reminded me of the "punchline" to the pink ping-pong balls story. I think the story is basically that a boy asks for pink ping-pong balls for every birthday; various people get them for him over the years. He grows up and still that's all he ever wants for his birthday. Eventually he's on […]