Mind Sailing

kvd wrote a comment that I thought was worth reproducing in full:

"Hi Jim

I started out this a.m. with every intention of distracting you, but instead got distracted myself.

In searching for a reference to my intended distraction, I somehow ended up on Schulz: The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature which of course meant that I had to refresh my understanding of participle, and that lead me somehow to JS Bach's "it's not difficult - you just have to hit the right note at the right time, and the organ does the rest" - which itself is quite a remarkable view of genius - no?

And the above voyage took a little over an hour, before it struck me that what I was doing was 'mind sailing' - a phrase I now claim authorship of (noting the dangling, but ignoring it for the moment).

Anyway, what I wanted to mention was a small book I've just finished reading which I think you would find quite interesting: "One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw" by Witold Rybczynski. Do make a note of it; one hundred pages of enlightenment about the evolution of a very common household and workshop tool.

Oh, and I nearly forgot to say thank you reproducing my photograph: evidence yet again that there is no job too small that it can't support a supervisor or two :)

kvd"

Mind sailing, I like that. It's quite descriptive and describes what many of us do, if not always to the same extent as kvd! Note the careful use of the colon in the last paragraph, a sign of the influence of the Schulz piece; that piece is worth reading.

I actually discovered the full use of punctuation quite late.

kvd, I haven't heard of Rybczynski. There seems to be something Polish in the air at present; Radwanska won the tennis last night. I actually like histories of domestic items. They inform the bigger picture.