Some good advice from Patrick Hughes. No, I haven’t heard of him either, but his advice seems sound.

“Dungeons and Dragons never goes away. Girls will still sense that shit 20 years later.”

Yes, the FP crew are a bunch of language nerds, so it is with confidence I direct you to Word Spy. Neat! There is a Word Spy book coming out next week.

Also, if you have access to the online OED (check your local library if you live in Washington state, hooray for the statewide database initiative), if you poke around a bit, you can see a list of words introduced into English in a particular year. It’s a pretty cool snapshot of a time.

From 1916, a book that tells you all about the kind of thrift where you pay less money instead of more, Adventures in Thrift. Yes, the tips are told as the thrifty adventures of Mrs. Larry!

“Mrs. Larry was not her real name. She was Mrs. Lawrence Hall, born Gregory, christened Elizabeth Ellen, but from the day of her marriage she had been nick-named “Mrs. Larry” by all those fortunate enough to count themselves as friends or acquaintances. And she loved the name. She said it made her feel so completely married to Larry.”

From the jacket of the book Letters to Henrietta, another potential miracle cure:
“Until the middle-aged, unmarried Isabella Bird (1831-1904) left her native Scotland for an independent life of travel, she was debilitated by illness, suffering from “neuralgia, pain in my bones, pricking like pins and needles in my limbs, excruciating nervousness, exhaustion, inflamed eyes, sore throat, swelling of the glands behind each ear, stupidity.” Bird was so weak that she required a steel support to hold her head up and spent most of her time confined to bed. Desperate to find a cure, her doctors finally packed her off to the Pacific and Switzerland. Once abroad, the forty-year-old invalid miraculously recovered, and became determined to seek any adventure that allowed her to see the singular beauty of nature. In Hawaii, she was the first woman to climb the world’s highest volcano; in Perak, she rode elephants through the jungles; in Colorado, she scaled 14,000-foot mountains, spent six months traveling mostly alone on horseback, and fell in love with a one-eyed
desperado named Rocky Mountain Jim. But whenever she went home to Scotland, her symptoms returned, making another trip essential. Bird’s remarkable journeys took her to the remotest parts of the world and brought her considerable fame. In this fascinating collection of Bird’s previously unpublished letters to her homebound younger sister Henrietta, one experiences her journeys firsthand and gains insight into the ambiguous private life of a woman who often invented her public face.
Containing correspondence from her first two grand tours to Australia, Hawaii, and Colorado in 1872-1873, and to Japan, China, Malaya, and the Holy Land in 1878-1879, Letters to Henrietta provides a fresh view of the legendary Victorian traveler.”

I’ve always liked the idea of a hot tub without all the fuss and expense, so had my eye on furo-type heater that can be hooked up to a tank of your choice, such as an affordable stock tank. I don’t know how I feel about the Ikea-like plastic tub-ette, but check out the convection heater! Anybody know how to weld?

Scanner art is cool. And sometimes goofy.

Today’s Phrase that Pays is “Teriyaki Beef Dippers.”

One wonders if wandering radium is a bigger problem than previously suspected, but is only noticed when we’re on the lookout for radiation.

Radium has been attractive to the indigent in the past.

Cory Doctorow talks about how he conquered back pain using the power of the mind. I trust Doctorow enough to run and get the books. He describes it thusly:

“Your mileage may vary, but after more than a year of this, I’m ready to start talking about it. Like Atkins for weight loss and hypnosis for smoking cessation, Sarnoid back-therapy feels something like getting root on my body, like being able to move into user-controlled space stuff that the OS was badly mismanaging in the background.”

I would very much like to get root on my body, how about you?

Today’s Phrase that Pays™ is “Rimed with Frost”

Yeesh.