Note to the College Board: the correct transliteration for 'þ' is 'th', not 'p'. I've finally started to go back to analyzing the SAT writing material to infer the College Board's views on grammar, and while flipping through the January 2008 SAT, my eye came upon this bit from a passage in a reading section about Ezra Pound's translation of the Old English poem "The Seafarer":

Moreover, there are unfortunately some mistakes, as when Pound misreads purh ("through") as pruh ("coffin").

I've been neglecting my blog lately, partly because I've been busy, but also because my former service provider was giving increasingly spotty service, and I didn't have the energy to deal with it. However, I've now switched to a new provider that I trust will give much better service. (The site already feels much snappier). I can also finally upgrade Drupal.

My browser's home page is Google news, and when I am signed in, it gives me a list of "personalized" news stories that are supposedly based on my previous searches and news. Yet it continually serves up stories that I have absolutely no interest in (most recently the Britney Spears tragicomedy), and there seems to be no way to override what Google thinks is good for me. Why, oh why, don't they have a "not interested" button like Amazon? For the time being, I've given up on their personalization and will go to Google news without signing in.

I'm now in England for Christmas, after spending a week in Ireland. We stayed in a lovely rural area in Claire, and one of the spots we stopped was Bunratty castle, a fifteenth-century structure that has been quite well restored. Like many other castles, it is cramped and has lots of narrow staircases, not at all like the Hollywood image of spacious luxury. You can understand why so many aristocratic families tended to abandon their castles for more comfortable dwellings.

According to the Blog Readability Test, my blog has a high school reading level. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. Part of me feels that I need to work harder to obfuscate my writing lest someone question my academic credentials. Of course it could just be the algorithm. I presume that this site is using something similar to the Unix style command. When I run my ten most recent items (not all of which are on the front page) through style, I get the following results: readability grades: Kincaid: 9.2