31 March 2009
16 July 2007
12 July 2007
Daring Fireball: On Top
10 July 2007
21 May 2004
Hyperlink Research
The web has been around long enough that newspapers’ websites should have policies regarding when to cite a company’s webpage. Generally the first mention of an entity should either be a link or be followed by one in parantheses. Articles should also have a section at the bottom containing all the links mentioned above so that people can do futher reading on their own. Under no circumstances should an article be published without links when they’re available.
18 July 2003
Worst Opening Ever
This post by Kottke is fantastic. I reprint it in full here:
It was a dark and stormy night (with cheese)
Mariann Simms has won the 2003 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, “a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels”. Her submission:
They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two- flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white…Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn’t taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently.
The contest is named for Edward George Earl Bulwer- Lytton, a Victorian novelist whose opening to Paul Clifford is widely regarded to be just a bit over-the-top bad:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
When not winning contests, Mariann runs HumorMeOnline.com.
Would that I could write so poorly.