The Letter A

Alphabet Books

I love alphabet books, whether they border on educative, illustrative, or merely charming, and have been unduly fascinated for with them for years. In 1993, I set, printed, and bound twelve copies of a An Alphabet of Nursery Rhymes, a compilation of nursery rhymes arranged alphabetically. Recently, I've begun a series of digital alphabets.

More: The Digital Alphabets

Ancient Studies

My undergraduate major in college was Ancient Studies, an interdisciplinary major. The focus of my coursework was the art, literature, and popular culture of Provincial Rome. I was particularly interested in the Italian towns, where change in social hierarchy, power, and culture can be seen in the broad tapestry of their times, and the non-Roman cultures.

Ancient World Web

The most famous of my web pages, the Ancient World Web is an index that aims to provide broad coverage of sites relating to the Ancient World - all cultures, all time periods before roughly 1000 A.D. Please, for the love of Pete, don't send me mail asking me to do your homework or mail/fax/FedEx you "everything about the Renaissance" or "everything [I] know about Ancient Rome." And coming up with a paper topic counts as your homework. How many times do I have to say this? How many places?

More: Ancient World Web

Anecdote

This anecdote lived on the front page of the Alphabet for months and months; lots of people linked to it, blah blah blah short-lived meme blah blah blah.

More: The Anecdote

Animated Gifts

I can still count on one hand the number of useful animated .gifs I've seen, and there aren't that many more that really impressed me. Naturally, in 1997, I decided to create the world's largest animated .gif (287k) in an effort to explain myself.

More: The Ubiquitous Animated Biography

Apple Macintosh

A Macintosh SE. We'd had Compaqs and other IBM-compatibles (as they were called in those days) and a TRS-80 before that, but the Macintosh SE enchanted me like no other. I ended up taking it to college with me. I've gone through several Macs since, but my latest is a graphite iMac I've named Ilsa. I run NT with XP apps at work, and feel equally at home on each. (They suit different parts of my personality.)

Asparagus

I can't stand the stuff. I dislike the texture even more than the taste.

Auctions

The curious thing about auctions (at least the ones I attend!) is how your frame of refence changes - all of a sudden, things you'd spend 30 bucks for in a store aren't worth upping your bid to $12, and things you'd never normally consider buying become attractive at $1. Among the highlights of my auction career: a Villeroy and Bosch coffee set I got for $5, 2 sets of garden racks I see in super chi-chi magazines for $30, a pair of demonic plastic light-up easter bunnies for $2, and assorted bits and pieces of glass.

Australia

I lived in Australia for about ten months when I was twelve, and I loved it. We lived right on the beach - one half mile north brought us to a great fruit market, one half mile south to the rock reefs and the places we bought our kilos of ham and cheese and bread. For a month, we lived in Pott's Point in Sydney, which I also loved. I explored the city with abandon.

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice is one of the greatest books ever written. Period. Persuasion may be even better.