Filed under: Uncategorized
My main blog is now almost entirely food related, and can be found at Herbert’s Kitchen
Love,
Herbert.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Sorry I’ve died recently (and will stay dead for the next month or so).
The problem is that I have been internet overloaded, mostly from my job. Ironically, I was writing a post on this very topic, but I haven’t even had the energy to finish that.
I do have plans for this blog though, or something like it, though they won’t be put into action until I have a chance to breathe.
See you in August.
H.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: History, J Street, Language, Washington DC
This was an e-mail from my father. I live not far from where J Street should be, and am glad to have another theory on the matter. Google gives the original source as the DC Almanac
MICHAEL FELDMAN’S Whad’ya Know may have solved a major local mystery: why DC doesn’t have a Jay Street. The guest was an author who had written about the history of letters and he pointed out that Noah Webster in 1828 was the first person to publish a dictionary with all 26 letters of the alphabet in it. The letter J was one of those that were frequently missing. Noah Webster came along several decades after Washington was laid out.
WIKIPEDIA – The letter J is the tenth of the Latin alphabet; it was the last to be added to that alphabet. . . . Only about .06% of letters in English, .22% in Spanish, and .29% in French on average are Js. It is the 24th-most frequent letter in English, the 23rd-most frequent in Spanish, and the 21st-most frequent in French. . . Some believe that Petrus Ramus (d. 1572) was the first to make a distinction between I and J. The differentiation was probably made first in Spanish though, where, from the very introduction of printing, we see j used for the consonant, and i only for the vowel. For the capitals, I had at first to stand for both (as it still does in German type, and in all varieties of Gothic or Black Letter); but before 1600 a capital J consonant began to appear in Spanish. . .
In England, individual attempts to differentiate i and j were made already in the 16th century, as by Richard Day, who printed books in London after 1578, and George Bishop, who printed the translation of La Primaudaye’s French Academie in 1586, with i, j, u, v, differentiated as in modern use, but had no capital J or U. The J j types are not used in the Bible of 1611, nor in the text of the Shakespeare Folio of 1623; these have I i for both values; but the latter has a capital Italic J in headlines in the proper names ohn, uliet, ulius, and in the colophon, list of actors, etc., thus showing a tendency to use this (in its origin merely an ornamental variety of I) as a J. . . .
But though the differentiation of I and J, in form and value, was thus completed before 1640, the feeling that they were, notwithstanding, merely forms of the same letter continued for many generations. . . In dictionaries, the I and J words continued to be intermingled in one series down to the 19th century. Dr. Johnson, indeed, under the letter I, says “I is in English considered both as a vowel and consonant; though, since the vowel and consonant differ in their form as well as sound, they may be more properly accounted two letters”. . . .
SO FORGET ABOUT the Pierre L’Enfant hating John Jay myth; it’s more J was just a letter too few people knew or cared about.
Here are a list of the sites that I am in active use of. There are probably more that I use less frequently but still deserve mention, but can’t remember of at one in the morning.
WordPress: Eyes Open (this blog), 500 Flavors of Doom
Twitter: HerbertInc
Del.icio.us: Herbertanzer
Livejournal: Herbertinc
Wordie: Herbert
MyBlogLog: Herbertanzer
Flickr: Herbertanzer
Technorati: Herbertanzer
TheChocolateLife: Herbert
Ctrl+Alt+Squeak(A Personal Website in desperate need of updating)
Facebook Profile
World Community Grid: Herbertanzer, Team: SWIL, running “Nutritious Rice for the World”
Browser: Flock 1.1 with the Zotero toolset
Chat clients: AIM, IRC, SMS
Basically if you see the below icon attached to the name Herbert, you can be guaranteed that it is (a) Me or (b) someone impersonating me or (c) someone who hacked into my account.
if you visit American cities,
you will find them very pretty.
Only two things you must be aware:
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air.
-Tom Lehrer
Recently there’s been a large hulaballoo about this report on contaminants in our tap water. I was neither surprised nor outraged to hear about this. What did surprise me however, was how much everybody acted as if they didn’t know about it. We live in a closed system; it only makes sense that what we put into the water is going to end up coming out of our faucets.
But really, I don’t think this is such a big deal, at least not for humans. It’s not cholera or giardia or dysentery. In the developed world, we’re doing pretty good regarding those nasty things. So in that sense, I think we’re doing a pretty good job. The water we drink is much less contaminated than it used to be. Heck, it’s clear – that’s an improvement than a century ago when the water could be so cloudy that Ivory Soap was invented to float so you wouldn’t have trouble finding it at the bottom of your bathtub.
What we put into our own systems doesn’t bother me so much. Even with all the lead, the asbestos, the drugs, and all the other toxins the media is always trumpeting about, the human lifespan is has increased amazingly, and is still improving. I mean, I suspect what we are so alarmed about finding in our system has been there for a lot longer than we think, it’s just that we didn’t have the technology to see it, since the concentration is so dilute.
It’s the media’s fault, really. When they get bored reporting on war, famine, recession, and whatever other flavor of doom of the day, contamination makes a pretty good choice. People are scared. They are careless of what what they put into the system but paranoid about what they put into themselves (excepting fats and empty calories). And shock tactics work well for holding an audience.
No, what bothers me is what we’re putting into the system of the rest of the world. Killing off animals with toxic waste, choking our air with smoke, and our water with oil. Contaminating pure strains of crops with GMO DNA, rendering it inedible. If only humans were affected by what we do, it wouldn’t bother me so much. Not that that means I don’t think we shouldn’t stop killing ourselves slowly, but rather that I think it’s just as important that we realize that we’re not the only ones here. If we were, well, we wouldn’t be here for much longer. We need to respect this planet and everything else that lives on it. It is a matter of our very survival.
I’ve always found it ironic that human are supposed to be the most evolutionarily advanced species on the planet, and yet, we seem to be the ones with a poorly developed survival instinct.
In a way, I suppose I should be grateful for our nation’s contaminationphobia. Since it’s finally getting people to stop and think that maybe they don’t want to let industry to put all those toxic chemicals into our waterstream and that maybe waste output should be regulated closer. It would be about time.
