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When victrolas and other music players were first introduced, they weren’t very good. As the technology improved, they slowly replaced live performances in many but not all situations. We still have live orchestras and live bands even though most of the music we listen to on a daily basis is recorded. Players also made it possible to listen to music in situations in that were never practical with live performers, such as while commuting or Read more…

I’m in the 19-range of my beginning-to-end read of the AMA Manual of Style, and I find my throughhiking metaphor still holds up. Not only am I walking through places that a section hiker might not find worth the time (charts, vocabulary lists), but my pace and milage are heavily affected by outside factors. Because the point of the exercise is to earn points for my certification maintenance, I’ve been using a stopwatch to track Read more…

I like my metaphor of through-hiking the AMA Manual of Style. The point of reading Big Blue beginning to end isn’t to memorize everything I see along the way. It’s that the act of doing it is inherently different from reading one section as needed or looking up individual issues as they arise. The AT does not always hit the best hiking in the states through which it passes (Bill Bryson commented in A Walk Read more…

This year, I decided to earn some of my BELS maintenance points by brute force: An epic reread of the AMA Manual of Style. For my hiking readers, this is like doing an AT Northbound but with copyright law and specialized punctuation rules instead of Springer, Washington, and Katahdin. Like with an Appalachian backpacking trip, I’ve set reasonable daily goals, staying hydrated, and probably eating more Cliff bars than is good for me. But if Read more…