Category: Amazement

Bizarre and Beautiful Language Phenomena

6/16/2017

Blood Fall, Antarctica. (Photo credit: Peter Rejcek, NSF)

When BBC Travel posted a list of the world's most bizarre natural phenomena in August of last year, I read it with rapture.

Did you know that there's a blood red waterfall in Antarctica?

Or that in northern Canada there's a lake full of frozen bubbles? (Ironically, the bubbles are highly flammable)

Frozen methane bubbles in a northern Alberta lake (Photo credit: @robertharding/Alamy)

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The Unbearable Lightness of Cryptics

2/23/2016

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About a month ago, the Sunday New York Time’s crossword puzzle blew the mind of a man named Shane Ryan and he wrote a fantastic article for Paste Magazine explaining why.

The theme of the puzzle was Coriolis force (the inertial effect that causes storms to spin in different directions depending on their hemispheric position) and it is applied with such elegance, you really have to see it to appreciate it.

“Look, it’s entirely possible that I’m just a hopeless nerd,” he writes. “Maybe this doesn’t seem as impressive to you as it does to me. But:”

the amount of pleasure this act of brilliance gives me is difficult to describe. It’s just so perfect, so virtuosic, and yet so playful. It’s the Platonic ideal of a crossword puzzle. And the amount of creativity and brainpower it takes to actually conceive of and create it is astounding to me.

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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Cryptics

10/9/2014

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Whenever I visit my parents' house, I spend a few private moments in front of one particular watercolour painting.

It is a scene of laundry drying in the backyards of a Montreal suburb in very early spring, sometimes in the 1960s. The artist who painted it was my grandmother and like much of her work, the medium is unassuming and the scene is quietly domestic. And yet, I am transfixed at every viewing. When I stand before that painting, I feel as if, for just a moment, I have stepped back in time and into her life.

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Cryptic on the Orient Express

8/5/2014

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When I write, I am alone. I'm physically alone in a quiet room but I'm also alone in my thoughts. Sometimes I become so absorbed in the text that I literally do not hear anything, including the sound of my husband's voice if he walks in and asks me a question. It's a solitary exercise, writing, from the first sentence I type out on the screen to the moment I hit "send" on the email to my editor.

So I'm always a little amazed when an acquaintance calls up to say she stumbled across a piece of mine in a magazine and enjoyed it. It seems magical somehow that a piece I wrote in such solitude has made its way out into the busy, bustling world and has a life of its own, interacting with people that I have never met and probably never will.

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Bizarre and Beautiful Language Phenomena

The Unbearable Lightness of Cryptics

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Cryptics

Cryptic on the Orient Express

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