A Few Things

A few items of interest:

• Here's a site on the study of human intelligence I found while Googling around for sites on TMC personalities.
• And, I found the copy of the Justice League cover below at a page devoted to chess in comic books.
• If you ever need a bunch of doodads to show people why they shouldn't smoke, this page is for you.
• Lots of nifty fonts to be found here.
• The George Allen Insult Generator. Sweet!
• Jay Parini writes about other people's home libraries. We finally got all the gray paint up on the side of the house this weekend, so hopefully it's just a matter of painting one room and I can get the remainder of my shelves up. Excerpt: One old friend, a classical scholar, has thousands of books, mostly in his field. When staying with him, I like to get up early and wander among his shelves, learning about the classical world by standing before his endless bookcases. The Greek and Roman writers, of course, are neatly arrayed, according to genre or period. It's interesting to see the elaborate commentaries at the bottom of the page (which often contain a hidden narrative, as Nabokov understood and put to good use in "Pale Fire," his witty novel in the form of a textual commentary), and it's useful to note the sort of scholarly work done in my friend's field. I still recall discovering "The Greeks and the Irrational," by E.R. Dodds: a staggeringly learned and stimulating book that I'd have probably not found except by accident. As a whole, this collection reflects a broadly educated mind of a kind rarely found these days, a person for whom history — and the humanities — are alive, even ablaze.