In mine, I would be played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. There’s a fair-to-middling physical resemblance, to be sure, but mostly, I just feel like he would do a really, really great job.

I’d also like it if he would say this about me:

The world is hard, and … being a human on this earth is a complicated, messy thing.

A comparative media studies class at MIT has published Des Imagistes, Ezra Pound’s out-of-print poetry anthology, as a website. And it’s sort of beautiful. (Bookslutty.)

Matt can keep his Kindle — I’ll take one of these:

I seriously want to know more about the early history of astronomy. Less the sociology than the psychology of it – what was it that led humans to devote themselves to such long-term, precise observations? A belief in the power of distant gods? Boredom? The urge to find certainty somewhere, anywhere in the cosmos?

Via HNN/Ralph Luker.

This feels like a significant cultural artifact. So disturbing it’s impossible to look away. I’m about to go wash my eyes out with soap.

(If you’re looking for someone to blame, blame Taylor.)

I do agree that Facebook takes all of the honor out of remembering your friends’ birthdays. But it also averts all of the drama of forgetting them. So … net win. Post a review of the Prelinger film. And if you get to speak to Rick Prelinger, tell him he better put that sucker up on archive.org under a Creative Commons license. And it better be better than this.

For your birthday, I’m getting you a Facebook gift.

Yum:

The most common mistakes made by home bakers, professionals say, have to do with the care and handling of one ingredient: butter. Creaming butter correctly, keeping butter doughs cold, and starting with fresh, good-tasting butter are vital details that professionals take for granted, and home bakers often miss.

Butter is basically an emulsion of water in fat, with some dairy solids that help hold them together. But food scientists, chefs and dairy professionals stress butter

I’m fascinated by Barack Obama’s conception of himself as a writer, and doubly fascinated by his partnership with younger-than-me speechwriter Jon Favreau. This Washington Post article by Eli Saslow (“Helping to Write History“) indulges both fascinations to the hilt. Enjoy.

Over at Brainiac, Christopher Shea writes about interlineal translation, where each line of text is followed by a native-language (and generally near word-for-word) translations. James Hamilton popularized the method in the early 19th century (interlineal translations are sometimes called “Hamiltonian”), but they’ve fallen out of favor as a method of language instruction in favor of immersion.

It’s really hard to find published interlineal translations, but the writer Ernest Blum says that immersion education has failed and that we ought to resuscitate Hamilton’s pedagogy (or something like it) using texts like the Loeb classics, which have opposing-face translations (a method that’s still much more common). The Loebs aren’t interlineal, but they’re the next best thing.

Wait a minute, though — we’re not stuck with the books we’ve got! We’ve got computers! As long as we’ve got the text, we should be able to represent these books any way we want — as pure foreign-language texts, straight translations, line-by-line, or page-by-page.

If we really want to try giving line-by-line translation a try, someone should design a super-slick front-end for something like the Perseus database that spits out beautiful interlinear translations just for students learning to translate. And make it easy to switch views; in fact, you could do different lessons using different methods.

In fact, I don’t understand why we don’t have crazy rich client applications like Rosetta Stone packed to the gills with classic texts in every language for people to learn to read great books in their original languages. You could add reference sources, digital footnotes, audio recordings (Ian McKellan reading the Odyssey, anyone?) — lots of stuff.

There are so many more things — just simple things, really — that we could be doing with digital texts. As the other great Homer would say, “I could do a lot of things if I had some money.”

Bottle Rocket is out on Criterion Blu-Ray. Dave Kehr writes a lovestruck review:

Stylistically,

My skepticism about the signal-to-noise ratio of Atlantic bloggers has a big asterisk next to it pointing to James Fallows. I like Fallows not least because of his tone — he prefers chiming the triangle to banging the gong, although he can blow the horn when he wants to.

His coverage of the Eric Shinseki and Steven Chu cabinet picks show off Fallows at his blogly best. And today he has a follow-up about the Chu pick, with feedback from a writer (Steve Corneliussen) with contacts in the physics community. (Where else in journalism besides a blog can you cut-and-paste an email without chopping it up, paraphrasing it, or otherwise interjecting yourself all over perfectly well-reported and well-written analysis?)

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