H. sapiens sapiens has been characterized as "the animal that
[does X]" for all values of X within a good rhetorical
leap of the plausible. Language, I claim, is the most interesting
one.
When you have five minutes to kill, do you ever browse through the
dictionary? Okay, maybe not, but it's a cut or two above cereal
boxes, while not so engrossing (and with no chapters to finish) as to
distract me from whatever I should be doing in five minutes.
By the time you start wishing that you'd read the thing systematically
to avoid repetition, you've seen rather many words. I've collected
some of the interesting ones (and some from other sources) to make a
Book of Words. I hope that it (not
suffering from the
dictionary problem)
is more fun to read than the raw dictionary.
There is some
poetry
here.
I don't know that I actually expect people to find these of use.
But I write occasional
nanoreviews,
usually when I realize that I'm beginning to forget what the book was
about.
Along with their other content, the NYTimes makes
their crossword
puzzles available on the Web, though they started charging 2/97.
They're in some weird format, to be read by a specialized program.
The program's authors are really quite good about Unix support, with
versions for Linux, Solaris, Irix, and H-PUX... but no Ultrix. So
here's a perl5 script that generates
PostScript from the puzzle files. Actually, it spews the clues as
text, because I never finished the PS column-layout code.