The Reading Room

« first day (3173 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (1776 days later) »

Bookworm

03:29

Q: I need to find this book! please read!

so there's this book I read a long time ago about a stuffed cat and a stuffed dog who get hungry when their owner leaves and eat eachother. like, they rip eachother appart until they are each just a rag... they looked like this it's really dumb, but it's bothering me so much that I don't know...

story-identification

6 hours later…

Bookworm

09:36

Q: In The Hollow Needle by Maurice Leblanc, did M. Brédoux just "drop" the paper with the code of the Hollow Needle?

Maybe I missed something in the book, but the way the good guys and Beautrelet just get to stumble upon that very importance piece of information feels weird to me. I mean, it's a legit, massive secret paper that have been around and hidden for centuries and Brédoux or Lupin (or some of the Lupin...

french-literature

2 hours later…

Bookworm

11:54

Q: Any significance to the "Dutch clock" and "Chinese plate" in Eugene Field's "The Duel"?

I just learned from an answer to an ID question about the poem "The Duel", or "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat", in which Eugene Field describes a vicious fight between two stuffed animals as told to him by a "Dutch clock" and a "Chinese plate". The repeated mention of countries, in this other...

poetry symbolism eugene-field

Tsundoku

12:04

Should anybody here be interested in making their own facemasks: the French standardisation organisation AFNOR has made a standard for facemasks available free of charge and in four languages: French, Spanish, English and German.

I sewed my own facemask (two layers) two weeks ago, before I was aware of the standard. It takes a bit of time if you don't have a sewing machine ...

Napoleon Wilson

12:26

Maybe when they ultimately become mandatory and there's nowhere to get one.

Though, even then just using the unavailability as excuse would probably be easier. ;-)

Tsundoku

I doubt unavailability will be accepted as an excuse if it is possible to make your own.

And by making your own instead of buying those used in hospitals, you aren't driving up demand (and prices) for the equipment hospitals need.

Napoleon Wilson

A scarf ought to work too anyway.

Tsundoku

A scarf is only good enough as a last resort.

Napoleon Wilson

It's a piece of cloth supposed to keep your virus drops inside of your mouth.

Tsundoku

12:54

@Bookworm @Randal'Thor is asking on behalf of the Black Forest Clock Association. Ignore the Chines plate reference, it's a decoy :-P

Mithical

@Bookworm This just entered HNQ.

Tsundoku

@Mithical Looks like our HNQ feed for this room is not working.

Tsundoku

13:36

If Shakespeare were alive today, would he write Maskbeth?

Rand al'Thor

@Tsundoku Coronolanus.

Thanks for the migration, @Napoleon.

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor Anthony Fauci and Coronapatra

Rand al'Thor

Coronbeline.

Twelfth Day in Isolation.

Tsundoku

The Coronapandemic of Errors

The Pandemic's Tale

Napoleon Wilson

13:59

<yawn>

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson Remember to cover your mouth.

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor He's wearing a scarf.

Napoleon Wilson

14:35

Hah, and apparently it is mandatory from monday on.

Scarfs are allowed, though.

Or scarves for that matter.

Bookworm

14:57

Q: In what way would windows appease or calm us?

Alain Bashung's song Sur un trapèze, with lyrics by Gaëtan Roussel (see the Wikipedia article about the album Bleu pétrole, released in 2008), contains the lines On dirait que sans les poings on est toujours aussi balèzes Et que les fenêtres nous apaisent Translation (if I understand the...

meaning song-lyrics french-literature gaetan-roussel alain-bashung

5 hours later…

Gareth Rees

19:59

@Tsundoku I see that you are making pre-emptive room in the tag system for emma-zinn and emma-kenyon. But I'm not convinced it is worth it — there is only one Emma that everyone knows

Tsundoku

20:19

@GarethRees It's the same approach we use for The Dark Tower and The Art of War. I don't know if there other Emma novels in languages other than English. There's also a manga entitled Emma and a bunch of songs.

verbose

20:37

The Two Gentlemen of Corona, duh

Speaking of Emma, that's the second question I've asked (ever!) in Lit Stack Exchange and once again it gets a bunch of upvotes but zero answers. Sigh.

Tsundoku

@verbose Coroneo and Juliet

verbose

Troilus and Covida

verbose

20:59

@Tsundoku thanks!

@Randal'Thor well, Randy, nobody answers my questions, so ...

Tsundoku

@verbose I don't own a copy of Emma and the libraries are closed, so it'll have to wait... (Reading an entire novel on a screen is not an option for me.)

Gareth Rees

21:17

@verbose You locked the question down so tightly that I don't think it can be answered to your satisfaction

I had a good look through Emma but as far as I could tell the novel is silent on the source of the Woodhouse fortune. So any answer would have to be based on extra-textual considerations — but you ruled those out in the question

Bookworm

Q: On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in Society* by Thomas Carlyle

I was trying to read the following excerpt from On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in Society by Thomas Carlyle, and I had a few questions. (The emboldening is mine; bolded phrases or words in a passage are followed by a question referring to it.) It is well said, in every sense, that ...