Four Treats Just For Pleasure

Well, my whole posting this morning hinged on three photos -- but blogger refuses to upload any of them.

I've been trying since 4 a.m., but the system just keeps giving me error messages, and the "help" section doesn't tell me how to fix whatever is wrong.

Sorry.

I'll try again later today or tomorrow.

GOT IT NOW(at 1:20 p.m.), Thanks to Donald:

*1. Here is the funniest cartoon I’ve seen in ages. It comes from Fuzzy Squid’s website at http://fuzzysquid.com/main.html . Is another Gary Larson in the wings?

*2. Another great fun thing can be found through Heather’s Halloween blog at http://epnurse.blogspot.com/ . She lets you carve your own pumpkin. Here’s one I did:

Ok, Even with Donald's help I can’t transfer my pumpkin pix -- but I can tell you that when Michael Angelo sees my sculpture, the poor fellow will weep with envy… or something.

*3. Last week Donald set up this next fun thing. It’s a dream log where you can record your dreams and have other people comment. Or you can read their dreams and make your own comments. This is just for fun and it can be found at http://www.dreamlibrary.org/ I find it hard to navigate (remember, they wrote the Dummy books with me in mind) but normal peodple and more computer literate folks should have no trouble.

*4. The other day I met a lady who just bought a copy of my dinosaur novel, Glog – only she pronounced it LOG!

It seems that she had never heard of an illuminated manuscript so she did not recognize that the initial G was a letter of the alphabet.

This dismays me because many scenes in the novel revolve around Glog’s work illuminating a Bible manuscript as he ponders the purpose of his existence and the question of intelligent design in the universe and in his own adventures.

But this reader had no idea of what an illuminated manuscript even looks like.

Honest, it just never occurred to me that readers would not realize what I was talking about. But I suppose it’s like computer geeks expecting me to know what a Linux cluster does. Or an auto mechanic thinking I’d know where the voltage regulator is under my hood. Or a seamstress telling me to nit one, pearl two. We can’t expect other people to have the same background we bring to any given subject.

Back when I was young, I worked for about ten years at the Library Of Congress. There were over 3,500 employees there at the time. Occasionally I was assigned work in the rare book room and I actually got to handle some of the illuminated manuscripts.

In fact I once received a letter of commendation for finding and killing some bugs in one volume the library’s Guttenberg Bible (It was printed in three volumes). I don’t know enough Latin to read either illuminated manuscripts or a Guttenberg Bible; all I can tell you about them is that those suckers are unbelievably heavy!

But they are also beautiful.

I find them so exquisitely beautiful that they bring tears to my eyes.

So, just for the pure pleasure of seeing them, here are a three links where you can enjoy authentic illuminated manuscripts and incunabula for yourself:

http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/browse.htm

http://www.kb.nl/kb/manuscripts/index.html

http://www.drgenescott.com/stns.htm

I hope you enjoy this stuff as much as I do.

Have a great weekend.