I'm not writing much on this blog anymore, mostly because I'm on Facebook (or sometimes Twitter) instead. And the photos I've been posting lately have come from a single-button publishing thingy on Flickr. That's not really a lovin-spoonful to the blog, it's more like a tablescrap thrown to the dog: "Here, dead blog, have a photo; you'll enjoy it."
I'd even forgotten how to login to this blog. It took me awhile to figure it out, and when I did, I found that the web user interface I had been using (the TypePad "Dashboard") had been fb-twitterfied, encouraging me to use a "Quick Compose" textbox to "Share what's interesting to you."
So, this should be the paragraph in which I lament the supremacy of the 140-character-limited Twitter paradigm against the more superior 500 or even 1000 character contributions that were previously sprinkled throughout this blog (roughly 5,000 of them, but who's counting?), but I really can't be bothered.
On to paragraph four.
And five: why not a huge reference book, instead? Plenty of words in there. My current favorite is the Oxford Companion to World War II, a 1500 page monster that I've found to be quite a page-turner, even if I'm not turning them successively.
The selection of a few sentences from this mightly wordosaurus at random will suffice:
1) "On Spitzbergen, where one German team flew daily reconnaissance flights, German and Norwegian meteorologists clashed in a number of running fights." [Entry on "meteorological intelligence," pg 741]
2) "In 1944 and 1945 air raid precautions were the subject of several instructional films while the young Kurosawa's The Most Beautiful depicted women in an optical lens factory. ["Japan," pg 631]
3) "It was easier to make a general agreement on reparations at Yalta---awarding the USSR half the German liability---than it was to come to specific terms on Poland." ["diplomacy," pg 305]
4) "US codename for the Japanese diplomatic cipher enciphered on the Alphabetical Typewriter 97. For details see MAGIC." ["PURPLE," pg 916].
See what I mean? It's hard to not want to read a bit more. If only someone would write it. And in fact, they did, in the Oxford Companion to WWII.
