posted by xhenxhefil 1:18 PM
About this weblog...not too much needs to be explained. Several times I've just been wandering around the stacks with someone else, pointing to things, and now I can remember these things and annotate them. It's like a diary, except not of my life or my ideas or things that happen. It's like a diary in that it preserves things that were once in my brain. My goal is to have a weblog for an entire year without once using the words "musing", "rambling", "soapbox", "rant", or "I".
I'm an undergraduate microbiology major (maybe you could guess that, since the only library cited so far, apart from Hillman, is the biology one, Langley), with a linguistics minor, and my interests include liberal activism, poetry, learning how things work, birdwatching, baseball, soccer, tea, independent music, metal music, old useful tools, and everyday things from foreign countries that become hilariously weird by their very existence in this country. I'm an officer in Pitt's Quiz Bowl and Amnesty International clubs.
Baseball team: Phillies, although I've never been to any of their games, whereas I've been to two Pirates games. And the Devil Rays, of course.
Soccer team: Bolton Wanderers. Why? Because I've always been somehow attracted to the town of Bolton; because they have the hilarious Danish lout Stig Tofting; because they have possibly the only Icelandic player in the EPL, Gudni Bergsson; because their goalie is the backup for the mediocre Finns; because they have Jay-Jay Akocha, who once did eight consecutive back-flips after scoring a goal (by comparison, Inter Milan's Akinwunme Martens only did 5 after his recent Champions League goal); because of the dashing Armenian-French Youri Djorkaeff, who disappointed in the World Cup that should have been a showcase for him; because they recently acquired a player named "Florent"; because this season they've given up 4 tying goals and 1 winning goal in injury time; and because I own one of their jerseys.
Local bands: Lorelei, The Channel, Run For India, The Copyrights, Homecoming, Whatever It Takes, Aphasia.
Poets: Philip Larkin, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Isaac Rosenberg, Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Samuel Hazo, Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin, Margaret Atwood, Arthur Sze, Ann Darr, Patricia Hampl, Jon Anderson, Sigitas Geda, Kevin J. Smith, Steve Langan, Kevin Prufer, Mary Jo Bang, Donaldas Kajokas, Larissa Szporluk.
Languages: 5 years of French, 2 semesters of Arabic, ~1 self-taught semester of Lithuanian followed by 5 weeks in the country. People keep asking me how many languages I speak. The correct answer is "some French"; I just know how to pronounce things pretty well in some other languages.
posted by xhenxhefil 12:16 AM
"Xhenxhefil" is the Albanian word for "ginger". It's pronounced "jen-jefeel". So far one stranger has emailed me about the weblog, and that stranger recognized the word "xhenxhefil" and thus thought I was a female. Last semester I did a project on Albanian, and it required me to rifle through a big Albanian-English dictionary for a while; somewhere I have a list of all the amazing-looking Albanian words that were found by randomly looking through that dictionary. My Albanian friend didn't recognize a lot of them; he kept saying "that's probably from the 18th century" or "that looks Gheg" or "well, I only lived there until I was 15; I'll ask my father about that one".
Just about every language has a pretty cool word for "ginger". French: "gingembre". German: "Ingwer". Italian: "zenzero". Welsh: "sinsir". Finnish: "inkivääri".
So, anyway, I'm not female.
posted by xhenxhefil 9:50 PM
Searches:
odd things
radium sulphate
all things footie
"charles howard candler" "coca-cola"
most odd things in America
psychological love scale
pitt's family picture
Jib Fowles
facts about molly picher
HOWARD CANDLER
diary Flamel -potter
random odd things
famous libraries in Costa Rica
"asa griggs candler" "quote"
Charles Howard Candler Coca Cola
hoyt metal company
asa griggs candler
historia del cancer en costa rica
travel blog costa rica
summary of henrik ibsen's brand
the Ihalmiut
"ja karunaratne" + "economics"
"biography of james thurber"
Henrik Ibsen's Brand
death date of john s. pemberton, coca-cola
qurg
Industrie and pitt
university pitt, humor
henrik ibsen's brand
ecology of human performance and OUT
Philip Powell Calvert
summary of the brand by henrik ibsen
Amelia Smith Calvert
odd things in the news
odd things to look at
Henrik Ibsen's "Brand" (summary)
David Cavanagh's Creation Records annals My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For
list of insects found in georgia
"language poetry" blog
albanian/phonology
costa rica site:blogspot.com
Gilligan's Island behind the scenes
bacon,beans and galantines
duck galantine recipes
mythology of wine
Gilligan's Rockland County
Punch or the London Charivari
naked asante men
wyndham lewis harvard
Dawn Wells naked
albanian phonology
molly picher
bekir karaoglu
shirley temple bees
molly picher wine
Percy Wyndham Lewis
frequency resolved optical gating site:.com
insects found in georgia
Duck Island NC / Libraries
+Flory +"The Archaic Smile of Herodotus" review
Hopefully not every single one of these people was disappointed. It's good that people are actually being forced to read Henrik Ibsen's Brand, though. It's a very interesting play.
posted by xhenxhefil 9:49 PM
Sites that have linked to OTIPL:
languagehat
librarian.net : a library weblog
Library Stuff: a weblog by Steven M. Cohen
30 Hours... in wired mode
yinz gan dantan an'at?
Bentley's livejournal
Breaching the Web ... a little at a time
Parenthetically Speaking (link to April 21 doesn't work)
::: wood s lot ::: fictive things wink as they will
BONOBO LAND
TheoWire: news and sources for theological librarians
(Woolgathering)^n - what the crazy lady reads from her morning newspaper over her morning cuppa coffee (link to May 3 doesn't work)
Silliman's Blog
The Skeptic (link to May 7 doesn't work)
Added Entries
Free Pie (link to May 18 doesn't work)
Xvarenah
Eeksy-Peeksy (one of those asterisks down there)
Tram Spark (one of those asterisks down there)
the discouraging word (June 12)
Sites with OTIPL on their blogrolls are emboldened on OTIPL's blogroll.
posted by xhenxhefil 9:10 AM
posted by xhenxhefil 11:12 AM
Books read this fall:
P.C.W. Davies, Julian R. Brown (eds.), The Ghost in the Atom : A Discussion of the Mysteries of Quantum Physics
Richard Ellis, The Empty Ocean: Plundering the World's Marine Life
Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Ronald Firbank, Caprice
Ismail Kadare, The General of the Dead Army
Ismail Kadare, The Three-Arched Bridge
Michael Kinsley, Big Babies
Ben Mezrich, Bringing Down the House : The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
Sidney Perkowitz, Universal Foam: From Cappuccino to the Cosmos
Siân Rees, The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Ben Schott, Schott's Original Miscellany
Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply
Books read this summer:
Kenneth Ackerman, Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield
Robert Asprin, Myth Conceptions
John Barth, Chimera
John Barth, The Floating Opera
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Thomas A. Bass, Camping With The Prince: and Other Tales of Science in Africa
Harold Brodkey, Sea Battles on Dry Land: Essays
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
Ian Christe, Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal
Nicols Fox, Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth About a Food Chain Gone Haywire
Errol Fuller, Dodo: A Brief History
Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?
Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain
Arianna Huffington, Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America
Ismail Kadare, The Pyramid
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Arno Karlen, Napoleon's Glands and Other Ventures in Biohistory
Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World
Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad
Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Michael Kinsley, Curse of the Giant Muffins: And Other Washington Maladies
China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
Garth Nix, Lirael
Garth Nix, Sabriel
John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
Iain Pears, Giotto's Hand
Iain Pears, The Last Judgement
Iain Pears, The Raphael Affair
Patrick C. Power, Sex and Marriage in Ancient Ireland
Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
Richard Preston, The Demon In The Freezer
Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market
Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
Jane Smiley, Moo
John Steinbeck, Of Mice And Men
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma
Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo
Books read since last summer:
Kobo Abe, The Ruined Map
Nancy Farmer, The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm
Jöstein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Michael Innes, One Man Show
Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
A.R. Ammons, A Coast of Trees
Jon Anderson, Death & Friends
John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath
John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Margaret Atwood, The Animals in That Country
Mary Jo Bang, The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans
Eileán Ni Chuílleanáin, The Second Voyage
Ann Darr, The Myth of a Woman's Fist
Sigitas Geda, Songs of Autumn
Gabriel Gudding, A Defense of Poetry
Patricia Hampl, Woman Before an Aquarium
Samuel Hazo, As They Sail
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men On The Bummel
Kenneth Koch, On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988
Kevin Prufer, The Finger Bone
Nigel Barley, Grave Matters: A Lively History of Death Around the World
Ken Croswell, Planet Quest: The Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems
Robert S. Desowitz, Federal Bodysnatchers and the New Guinea Virus: Tales of People, Parasites, and Politics
Paul W. Ewald, Plague Time: The New Germ Theory of Disease
John Gribbin, Stardust: The Cosmic Recycling of Stars, Planets and People
Robin Marantz Henig, A Dancing Matrix: How Science Confronts Emerging Viruses
George Johnson, Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20Th-Century Physics
Arno Karlen, Biography of a Germ
Ashley Montagu, The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity
John R. Postgate, The Outer Reaches of Life
D.J. Enright (ed.) Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism
Don Foster, Author Unknown
Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
H.L. Mencken, The American Language
Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy
Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000
Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot
Linda Ellerbee, "And So It Goes": Adventures in Television
Ben Stein, Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights: The Diary of a Mad Screenwriter
Bill James, 1988 Baseball Abstract
Leonard Koppett, The New Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball
Leigh Montville, Manute: The Center of Two Worlds
Robert W. Peterson, Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams
Mike Monroe, NBA Rookie Experience: What's it really like to play in the NBA? Find out from the new stars themselves! (with in-depth chapters on 1997-98 rookies Tim Duncan, Keith Van Horn, Chris Anstey, Jacque Vaughn, Tracy McGrady, and Bobby Jackson)
posted by xhenxhefil 11:07 AM
Oh well, today I used a first-person pronoun for the first time.
posted by xhenxhefil 11:01 AM
posted by xhenxhefil 2:39 PM
posted by xhenxhefil 4:55 PM
posted by xhenxhefil 12:11 PM
Today the site was added to the DMOZ "Libraries/Library and Information Science/Weblogs" directory. It says I'm a woman, though. I tried to send the category editor an email through DMOZ's form page, but it gave me an error message. Waiting to hear back.
posted by xhenxhefil 1:39 PM
Sites that have linked to OTIPL:
languagehat
librarian.net : a library weblog
Library Stuff: a weblog by Steven M. Cohen
30 Hours... in wired mode
yinz gan dantan an'at?
Bentley's livejournal
posted by xhenxhefil 4:58 PM
posted by xhenxhefil 1:20 PM
The Gas Face
posted by xhenxhefil 9:20 PM
posted by xhenxhefil 11:10 AM