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Here is a Sup—I mean repository of the texts of my together with some readings of them. The essays were broadcast by WXXI 91.5 Classical of Rochester, NY on Salmagundy each Saturday at 9:35am Eastern Time, from the beginning of time (1985) till May 2009 when Entropa (evil Goddess of Change-for-the-Worse-or-Possibly-the-Worst) troubled the minds of the WXXIites and they retired Simon and Salmagundy, and Rochester went into a terminal decline---for ever.
I continued on that brilliant bastion of all that's good and kultured, WCLV's syndicated Weekend Radio on many (mainly NPRish) stations traditionally on the first and third weekends of the month, though weekendage varied, till the horror crept ever onward and that too was devoured (in August 2023, a date which will live in infamy or at lease mild irritation)... and only I remain, defiant though wimpering.
Richard Howland-Bolton
There are pop-up pics and links all over the place here. In text they are indicated by a double underline like this:
mouse-overing brings the pop-up up and clicking (usually) goes to the link |
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The Twentieth Century is over!!
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There is a well-known phenomenon in non-logographic languages called ‘pronunciation spelling’ which has been used since time immemorial (which, by the way, has been the 3rd of September 1189 ever since the year 1276) to separate the linguistic men from the um... not-yet-men.
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Way back, through the dim mists of deep time, when giant sauropods slouched down Monroe Avenue; when computer makers were still hopefully banging rocks of silica together and a 128 Kilobyte Mac was considered a big deal; when photography was still something silvery that the great (and of course very English) Fox Talbot would have recognised; when printing was still something leaden (not to mention antimonic and stannous) that Gutenberg could still have made sense of; when ...
when ...
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Of course I put the blame squarely on all that bra-burning back in the 60’s; but for a bit of perspective, and before we get to that, we need to step back a bit...
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For one reason or another, and very much like most of the people alive today, I don’t remember the sixties at all! But ...but just occasionally a memory will surface to bask in the light of consciousness for a while, or maybe they are all merely flashbacks.
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Ahh! First loves!---And no, I’m not waxing sentimental about Mandy Erlenbach , or that girl that time in Barcelona near the Sagrada Familia, nor Bettina Wirtz on student exchange from Hannover or was it Hamburg: no ... no ... you see the other day I saw an article on a news site about some teenager or other who was arrested for making explosives; and it immediately reminded me of my first love...
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Nobody---not Leonardo, not Einstein, not even me---nobody is good at absolutely everything.
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The other day Diana-at-work was just starting to learn a new computer language---and in passing I should mention that learning new computer languages is something that hovers between being the bane of the programmer’s life and the whole point of that life, we live by learning them and we die a little every time we do it---why in my time I've learned to program in Basic, Pascal, Forth, Modula2, PostScript, C (and most of its children), AppleScript, Perl and loads more that I won’t, for once, bore you with---anyway just as I walked into her cube (myself trying desperately to avoid having to solve, for a few precious moments more, some sliminess in a cURL command) just as I walked in she had generated her first output from her new language: she had a window on her Mac with the following text in it.
It read “HELLO WORLD”.
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In a few shortish, rather dumpy days comes Halloween, that vile and engorging celebration of greed and consume-mass-quantities-ism, and I suppose in spite of everything I really should mark it, however reluctantly, or at the very least lament its approach.
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Millennia ago...
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