Here we go! It’s all the sundry occurrences and passing thoughts that didn’t warrant actual posts in January, as well as updates on popular or unusual items.

January Synopsis

Launched site, stayed healthy; traveled to California, got a cold.

February Prognosis

Regional travel (Seattle; Sunriver/Bend, OR; Cannon Beach, OR?); ten-year anniversary of meeting Mr. Pencil.

Site Content Highlights

• Site theme: Cycles, five themed posts about cycles, seasons, and recurrences. Unless you have a great topic idea for this theme, I’ll probably unveil and launch my new theme within a week or so.
• As of this writing, 685 respondents voted in my reader poll about removing dust jackets. 63% of voters always remove dust jackets, with only 13% voting full-on “No.”
• (Other) Popular Posts:
  • Reducing my burden on society by stabbing myself in the thigh
  • Pencilhaven wine cellar finally complete!
  • Photography: Bear with me, I’m going through a phase
  • Luma Loop: New camera strap, and I’m the model

Reader Comments

This is such an interesting time of year. In both the secular and astronomical calendars it is still very much Winter. But Winter isn’t a whole quarter year of dormancy and death. Beneath the earth and in the seeds, bulbs, and roots plants are stirring. Peoples of the European traditions would not be outside working their fields or building, but would be very active inside making and repairing tools, spinning and weaving, and telling stories around the fire…”

—Paul Bingman, re: My Post on Imbolc

First, David is right that you’re supposed to say “I hate rabbits” when getting a faceful of smoke. I learned that in Boy Scouts. Maybe he did, too? No idea where it actually comes from, though.

—Todd Stadler, re: My post about having a campfire and other things

I think it hilarious that some readers take the jacket off so it doesn’t get damaged. This is truly a perversion of the purpose of a dust jacket. How hard is it, really, to cope with a dust jacket while reading a book? On a following note, how many readers know how to properly condition a new book before reading? I was taught in school to protect the binding of any book by relaxing it before reading. Open to the middle and gently press the pages apart, then open at the “quarters” to do the same, then the “eighths” and so on. Interestingly enough, this makes it easier to cope with the dust jacket.

—Alicevee, in one of over 20 comments about removing dust jackets from books

The Wikipedia page cited clearly states that the distribution is for years STARTING on the days listed. The leap day itself occurs on a different day. For example, Wikipedia used to say, “15 leap years starting on Sunday”, which is correct. But in those years, the leap day itself occurs on Wednesday.

When this is taken into account, the results of my program agree with the Wikipedia article. I’ve modified Wikipedia to make this more obvious since it was very easy to misread it the way the data were presented before. I personally feel that the day of occurrence of the leap day is more important than the day the leap year started.

All of which is very long way of saying, the most common days for a leap day to occur on are Monday and Wednesday!

—Preston, doing a lot of really neat legwork in re: My post about the Gregorian calendar

Having just finished this, I have to say that I don’t agree with your opinion of Shepherd. I didn’t find him incomplete or empty. There was a definite character there.

As for the book, it took me a long time to get past the first 20 pages or so, but somewhere around 70 pgs in I found I was enjoying it. I would summarize it as “Forrest Gump does communism with some Kafka sprinkled in for good measure.”

—Elizabeth Menozzi, re: My Book Review of The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Not Quite Worth a Post…

Things I learned from the New York Times this month

• 70% of Yemen’s GDP comes from oil expected to run out in 7 years.
• 2009 was the lowest (best) on record for miners’ deaths in the United States: 34
• Goldman Sachs employees made an average of $595,000 each in 2009 (one of their most profitable years, ever).
• Prussia was the first (western?) country to make education for the “lower classes” compulsory, in 1753. Echoes of this system are still evident in today’s grammar school environment in Germany.
• The first cited source of the word “boredom” was in Dickens’ Bleak House.

Furniture from Leominster

I have a weird and potentially useless new piece of furniture standing awkwardly in the middle of my library. It’s a table. Well, of sorts. You’d never put anything on top of it, because the top is glass and exposes a red-felt-lined display area inside. It’s super. I want to put, I don’t know, Roman coins or the booty of some Mongol expedition or arrowheads (which I don’t have; you can read about my not-an-arrowhead collection here) in it. It would be elucidating to upload a photo of it—wouldn’t it?—but it seems so lonely and perplexed in the middle of my library floor that I think it deserves a full rearrangement of furniture and bookcases in here to suit it before I expose it to the Internet. So, someday soon.

It came from Leominster, Herefordshire, a town that would make the third vertex of a triangle if Birmingham and Shrewsbury were the other two. The point being, I’ve been to those two towns (climbed tall hill, the Wrekin, near the latter; lived in the former) but have not been to Leominster. I like having furniture from the Midlands and Wales because it is no-nonsense stuff. We also got a leaded-glass-hutch-shelf-cabinet thing (Welsh) for the front-room-next-to-the-piano because David rightfully got fed up with my letterpress supplies piling up on the poor baby grand.

To close this pointless diversion, I just have to point out: There is a furniture store in Leominster called “A Wing and a Chair.”

My BookBook came!

My new BookBook from Twelve South. Best laptop case ever.

Get your own BookBook?

Twin Peaks

I have an undying obsession with David Lynch’s late 1980′s serial awesomefest, Twin Peaks. I noticed that you can now stream actual full episodes for free on CBS’s site. This is especially curious as the show aired on ABC.

Site Notes

Based on reader comments and my own wherewithal, I:

• added links to The Social Photo Talk podcast, which I co-host with Aaron Hockley, to my photos page.
• added actual RSS/subscribe buttons. Swank.
• added the “Big Photo” theme for, well, big photos.
• other stuff I assure you you don’t care about, like better caching and less cruft.

Up next!

New site theme! A potentially mind-numbing post about a WordPress hack (bear with me)! Stuff I’ve got up my sleeve!

Thank you so much for reading. Please let me know if you have any ideas for things you’d like to see more of!