Siteseeing

The other day I was discussing grammar with my father, which led to a conversation on how difficult it can be to look up questions about such things on the Web.

This Is the Title of This Blogpost

I was reminded yesterday of David Moser’s delightful “This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself”.

While I first encountered it in the form of some unattributed, photocopied pages enthusiastically foisted on me by a friend, I discovered not long after that it was published in Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas, which became one of my favorite and most frequently re-read books. It collects installments of Hofstadter’s column of the same name for the magazine Scientific American, a column that succeeded — and was named by rearranging the letters to the title of — the venerable Martin Gardner’s column, Mathematical Games. Hofstadter is best known for his opus Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. Gardner is the editor/curator of another of my favorite and most frequently re-read books, The Annotated Alice; he has written many more, the latest of which is an essay collection titled When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations About This and That, published two weeks before the author’s 95th birthday. My grandfather hit the same landmark three weeks before Gardner, and I hope that my mind is as fresh as either gentleman’s at that age.

Clorox Makes It Dirty

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A few weeks ago my sister alerted me to an inadvertently hilarious detergent ad that
ran during Mad Men. It popped up again the other night, and thanks to the narration’s awkward grammar it’s still danged funny. You’ll find the relevant lines in the first comment on this post in case you don’t catch them or can’t play the video. [0:37]


Related: F Is for... • Driving Miss Peasy • What’s in a Name