If this entry was a hamper

and you liked picnics, I guarantee you’d have a somewhat grassier bum after this post. If you like the kind of online food I like, that is! *grin*

I started my online peregrinations today with Incoming Signals which I haven’t looked at since at least March; I could have browsed there all day but ended up thinking that branching out should be done. So, following a link from it, I found a [really good] history resource which then linked me to the frankly amazing Timelines of History. You want something from the past? Need to look anything up in a hurry? Even recent history? It’s all there.

Since I’m reading about the alphabet at the moment (as well as about 10 million other things) I looked on Languagehat, which apart from being a brill read in itself also led me very seriously astray, in the nicest way possible. To a collection of 100 old Japanese Tanka. Unfortunately the translation rhymes, and I squirm at that because there’s really no fucking need for something to rhyme completely and cringeworthily in English when it only half–rhymed (and was more beautiful) in Japanese. Grr.

From Languagehat I moved, also, to the very cultural wood s lot. One selected glint from the riches — a piece of Turkish delight poetry:

To think myself happy
I don’t need a piece of paper or a pen;
A cigarette dangling between my fingers
I enter the blue
Of the painting on the wall.

I can’t remember how I got on to Rich Language but I did, and was pleased to find that an online Etymology Dictionary is mentioned there. (I love sites by people who are addicted to something. They’re so infectious and thorough.) Etymology isn’t definitions of words, but histories of words, how they were first used, that sort of thing. See bum as an example. And via Inappropriate Response, a weblog, here’s news of a couple of really really old American skeletons. And via MetaFilter, the mystery of one more. Via The Minor Fall, The Major Lift comes inhalable alcohol. Good news for those of us who can’t stomach more than 4 pints at once.

Finally, one serious link and one not serious one. It’s entirely predictable that the world’s most active online Dictionary of Literary Terms should be French. And it’s entirely surprising that I live just east of Ered Luin, south of the Ice Bay of Forochel, and not in south Belfast at all.