Unorgastic experiences

Whilst looking for Germaine Greer quotes, I came across the following:

"Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting."
(Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, 1989)

Fine words, although it's hardly surprising that a famous academic should have such respect for libraries. What caught my eye was the word 'unorgastic'. The OED has orgastic down as "Of, pertaining to, or charaterized by orgasm" so I suppose she was spot on in describing libraries as the opposite. My interest in the word had been aroused though, so I did a search to see who else had used it. As far as I can tell, 'unoragstic' has not appeared in any of the publications on Lexis Nexis (apart from a couple of reviews of Greer's book) and Google only throws up rather a lot people repeating the quote. Can't wait to see how she describes the Big Brother house.

Reviewing the year.

Busy constructing a news-review of 2004 and am yet to come across a good source. Here at the GAOL we've been constructing a diary of events as they happen.

The web offers a couple of "week at a glance" sites such as Daily Telegraph and BBC but nothing for the whole year.

Finding anniversaries

Doing some research on prominent upcoming anniversaries reminded me of the value of the Longman "Chronicle of the 20th Century". It was published in July 1988 and is crammed with an almost day-by-day overview of the century. It's great for pre-web material and well worth holding on to - it's now out of print and a copy could set you back as much as £500.

The best web anniversay tool I know of is the BBC's On This Day

The beginning

In the beginning, there was a test posting . . .