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Tri-County Youth Festival
20 April 2009
Those who know me might have heard that last Saturday I participated in the Tri-County Youth Festival. I played Vittorio Monti’s Csárdás with Nico Salvitti, who very kindly accompanied me. [read more]
The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
17 April 2009
I came across this blog a few weeks ago through the Wordsmith A.Word.A.Day newsletter. People from all over submit to the owner of this blog egregious cases of unnecessary inverted commas. Unlike other grammatical errors (such as misplaced apostrophes), unnecessary quotes are not just incorrect but very humorous in their implications. Most of the time [...]
Passover and Easter
14 April 2009
I don’t suppose anyone knows when the Greek word πασχα pascha began to be used for Easter—actually, I don’t suppose anyone really knows exactly when Easter per se began to be celebrated. However, celebration of such yearly Christian festivals seems to have originated after the time of the apostles, as the church historian Socrates of [...]
Easter
11 April 2009
Easter Sunday is an ecclesiastical holiday that commemorates the resurrection of Christ. The English word ‘Easter’ is derived from a Germanic word for ‘east’; according to Bede, the name comes from a Germanic goddess Eostre. He writes: Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal month’, and which was once called after a goddess [...]
Archaic browsers
7 April 2009
I’ve come across a campaign to bring down Internet Explorer 6, an outdated non–standards-compliant browser from the year 2001. The reason that IE6 gets the movement against it and not some even older browser is that IE6 irritatingly controls almost 20% of the market. On April 1, however, some have launched a campaign to save [...]
Whisperings radio
4 April 2009
Since the advent of the Internet, many Internet radio stations have appeared. These radio stations stream audio from the websites that host them, and they represent many genres of music and speech. Apple iTunes has a radio function that integrates many popular streams, organized by genre, into a single interface. Two stations that I listen [...]