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Possibly my favourite Christmas present so far...
The great thing about having (a) friends scattered across the country and (b) a deep distrust of the post office is that you get to go on giving and receiving Christmas presents well into January.
Yesterday I was given a copy of Schott's Original Miscellany.
It's a book of useless information.
Actually, no, it's a book of useful, but extremely random and varied, information.
The kind of book you can allow to fall open and find...well, let's demonstrate:
<opens book at random>
The names of the degrees of Freemasonry, the names of the seven dwarves, a list of test match special nicknames, roman numerals, the names of the apostles, and a list of -ocracies to describe different government systems.
I'm determined not to read it all the way through, but to keep opening it at different pages and seeing what I find. Gems so far have been a description of the 18th century Hat Tax, a list of peculiar deaths of Burmese monarchs, a description of rhetorical techniques with Churchillian examples, classification of icebergs, the menu for the last meal on the Titanic...
And it includes a spec of itself (paper type, type faces used, number of mentions of the word ptarmigan...).![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
addedentry and jiggerypokery, I'm prepared to lay folding money that you'd love it :)
Yesterday I was given a copy of Schott's Original Miscellany.
It's a book of useless information.
Actually, no, it's a book of useful, but extremely random and varied, information.
The kind of book you can allow to fall open and find...well, let's demonstrate:
<opens book at random>
The names of the degrees of Freemasonry, the names of the seven dwarves, a list of test match special nicknames, roman numerals, the names of the apostles, and a list of -ocracies to describe different government systems.
I'm determined not to read it all the way through, but to keep opening it at different pages and seeing what I find. Gems so far have been a description of the 18th century Hat Tax, a list of peculiar deaths of Burmese monarchs, a description of rhetorical techniques with Churchillian examples, classification of icebergs, the menu for the last meal on the Titanic...
And it includes a spec of itself (paper type, type faces used, number of mentions of the word ptarmigan...).
addedentry and jiggerypokery, I'm prepared to lay folding money that you'd love it :)