Word Games

The original thesaurus is gone but an evolved creature has been sighted recently!

via NeatoShop.com
More verbal fun can be found at Fun with Words.  Go there to get your

• anagrams
• palindromes
• spoonerisms
• tongue-twisters
• pangrams and
• rebus puzzles

Don’t forget mnemonics! Be on the lookout for malapropisms too. It’s all part and parcel of the joy that is etymology.

Oxymorons? No

Oxymora are also featured. An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines two seemingly contradictory phrases. Fun-with-words taught me that “oxymorons” is not grammatically correct. I had assumed that oxymoron had a similar singular-plural form as moron versus morons!

Rebus as a puzzle

A rebus is more than a part of speech. It combines both text and visual images to make a statement. Creating a rebus is quite an effort. I learned that by composing one as a love letter, while at Swarthmore College.

There are some not-so-great rebus generators online.

Here’s a nice definition of a rebus:

Literary rebuses use letters, numbers, musical notes, or specially placed words to make sentences. Complex rebuses combine pictures and letters. Rebuses may convey direct meanings, especially to inform or instruct illiterate people; or they may deliberately conceal meanings, to inform only the initiated or to puzzle and amuse.

I found a Flickr user who has lots of rebus examples but they are all copyright protected. You can go look at them here.

Muro drawing application

I saw a Twitter entry from Chris Messina about this a few days ago. Pardon me, he’s trademarked his name, let me try this: chrismessina™ .  Here is the link to the Muro drawing application http://muro.deviantart.com/, and the Ultimate Muro User’s Guide.

It is free, it is from Deviant Art, and anyone can have fun with it. No artistic training is necessary. I say this with confidence.  Prior to trying it, I’d relied almost exclusively on MS Paint as a drawing aid. I drew a snail using Muro. Here it is.

Snail Fantasy by Ellie K (Muro Drawing Application)

I think it is a beautiful snail. However, I will continue to restrict my public domain creations to screen shots and uploads from the Second Life™ interface by Linden Lab™ until I acquire a more refined aesthetic sensibility.

HTML Tip:  For that little trademark entityTM superscript, use this:

 entity™

or the character decimal code:

 entity & # 8 4 8 2;

Note that the character hex code

 entity & # 2 1 2 2;

did not work. Perhaps WordPress is to blame? Also note that the extra spaces are mine:  despite many efforts, with much html, WordPress insisted on converting my source into page view.

UPDATE: For a more comprehensive description of Muro, and a very nice visual which is probably more aesthetically appealing than my snail, I’d suggest having a look at the CAD blog on Muro.

Update: Type is Art to Take With You

Parts of A Character U.S. Postal Stamp

Parts Of A Character stamps by scerha

The Type Is Art interactive site, which I was introduced to by via ProArt on Twitter, has a store on Zazzle. There are some delightful and truly original products here, and they are actually made by Susanne Cernha of Silo Designs, who is associated with the Type Is Art project.

Unlike most of the promotional product pages that link to many blogs and fan websites, this one is not a tired old recycling of the same t-shirts, porcelain mugs and canvas bags with a logo stamped on the front that I see everywhere. Update 17 Aug 2010: There are plenty of t-shirts, porcelain mugs, canvas bags and baseball caps on Zazzle, I just hadn’t found them when I wrote this post. However, that doesn’t extend to the TypeIsArt site.

Parts of a Character is a bona fide U.S. Post Office stamp. Denominations are U.S. First Class (first and second ounce) and U.S. Priority Mail < 1.0lb.  Update 17 Aug 2010: I was incorrect about quantity purchase requirements. They are not huge, but pricing is in fact based on order quantity. Another plus: there are no huge bulk purchase requirements.

I found another data-related site at Zazzle, the pleasant ethnographers from Floating Sheep. I’ll take the liberty of cross-linking to Ellie Asks Why Annex on Blogger, and my post about geo-tagging and Microsoft’s Tag application. It offers a curious opportunity for creating linkages between the physical world and the interwebs.

Time Stands Still When I Think of You

What is ShrEdit.tv?

ShrEdit is for uncut snowboarding videos.

I really like that logo! Bold intersecting rectangles enclose large point sans serif type font, all in black and red on a clean white background. It is very appealing.

Location: Xscape in Castleford UK, 18 June 2010
Music: Teddybear Crisis – Time Stands Still