Carpe Libra

One of the cool things about reading is how smart you get by doing it. I’m probably not the best example of this, but I’ve heard it’s true.
Today I ran into a new word, redivivus. It was in the following sentence dealing with economists, “But he was not simply Adam Smith redivivus.”
Hmm, what does it [...]

A guy by the name of Jay Walker has an incredible personal library. This is the kind of thing that makes a reading guy drool. The pictures in the article are very cool.
The chandelier is from a James Bond movie. He has a Sputnik satellite, plus thousands of books. The library covers 3,600 feet [...]

Bob Dylan was recently asked who his greatest creative inspiration was. His answer was Robert Burns and particularly his poem A Red, Red Rose, which happens to be on the Carp 500.
Opinions are mixed on Burns, many Carpers think he’s simplistic and trite, however, some Carpers and people like Bob Dylan and Abraham Lincoln like him.
I [...]

According to the Global Language Monitor, we are approaching the creation of the one millionth English word. A new word is added to the English language approximately every 98 minutes.
That being the case and all things remaining constant, we should achieve our one millionth word in April 2009. I wonder what the word will be?

Ilan Ramon was an astronaut on the Columbia disaster of 2003. All on board were killed, obviously, when the Columbia blew up.
There was a survivor of the disaster though, Ilan Ramon’s diary! It was found in a field in Texas after apparently surviving a 37 mile fall to earth!
Pages from the diary were put on [...]

OK, I give.
325 pages in I have to quit. The novel doesn’t go anywhere or do anything. He uses lots of weird words, words I could look up but don’t feel like it because I doubt I really want to know what he’s talking about anyway.
Then I looked at a synopsis of the rest of [...]

Forbes came out with a list of the top paid authors from the past year. Here are the top five.
1. J. K. Rowling–$300 million!
2. James Patterson–$50 million
3. Stephen King–$45 million
4. Tom Clancy–$35 million
5. Danielle Steel–$30 million
Most of the money comes from movie deals and such like. Most of it also comes from writing about the [...]

For Banned Books Week, I decided to read James Joyce’s Ulysses, well not quite the whole thing this week, it’s 640 pages long. Anyway, I have no idea why the book was banned. Nothing happens.
It’s the story of a guy going through a day and all his thoughts and other people’s thoughts and thoughts of [...]

In our nursery rhyme, we think that Humpty Dumpty is an egg. He’s not. He’s a cannon.
Georgie Porgie is about George Villiers.
Hey diddle diddle ode pokes fun of life at the court of Elizabeth I.
A new book is coming out by Sam Foster explaining the true meanings behind nursery rhymes. It’s not on Amazon yet [...]

Since it’s absolutely no fun to watch the stupid Cubs implode once again, I have found something else for you to watch during baseball games: the grass.
The New York Times has an article on David Mellor, groundskeeper for the Boston Red Sox and inventor of the artistry done in grass fields. He even wrote a book [...]