Who knew that George W. Bush was an even better poet than he is leader and policy-maker?
I heard about these language removal people on NPR earlier this week. The Language Removal Service has produced audio tapes of speech by leading candidates in the California gubernatorial election…with all the words removed. All that's left is breathing noises, “um's”, “ah's” and the like. They played some of their tapes on the radio, and you can hear them at their website. I found it deeply weird, especially given the utterly dead-pan way in which the guy describing it kept calling it a 'service to the public' as if the results were revelatory of something essential about the speaker's character. He was very good—it was hard to tell if he was a prankster, a Dadaist, or a new species of loon.
I deeply pray that no one ever does one of those to my lectures.
I've made a few blog enhancements by tweaking the Movable Type template. The most significant controls the way that the extended text is handled. I didn't like the way that long posts take up too much space, but nor did I like it when clicking on the extension took you to another document. Now I have one of those cute pop-in pop-out Javascript extensions. You can test it on the following line.
Jotwell
