Category: Happy Birthday

10 years of “Here I am”

I cracked the electronic mic ten years ago today with a GeoCities account (back before the Yahoo! acquisition). My first project was a set of photos taken from various vantage points along the 70-odd miles of Interstate 66. Painstakingly scanned and cropped, most of them nevertheless were quite pedestrian, and I’ve since taken the set down.

Nearly six years later, I migrated most of the rest of the content to a Comcast account. My Larry Shue appreciation page is still up, as is the suite of pages about the Wood Duck. I was experimenting with several blog-style efforts (here, here, and here), but the page-maintenance effort was dragging me down, so I climbed on the dedicated-software bandwagon once it picked up some steam, and the result was pedantic nuthatch.

I’ve a couple of Blogger-based side projects (here and here), I write and maintain the web site for Reston Community Players, and my fingerprints are beginning to appear in a couple of wikis.

Last year, after a futile bit of FTP-juggling and username chicanery, I realized that I was going to run out of disk space on the Comcast account, and so I moved my blogging house here. And now you know everything.

236 words

Theodor Geisel built The Cat in the Hat from a word list for 6- and 7-year-olds, as Lynn Neary reports. The book is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and it’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday too.

“Seuss was used to inventing words when he needed them, so to stick to a word list was a huge challenge for him,” [Philip] Nel [author of The Annotated Cat] says. “And, in fact, his favorite story about the creation of The Cat in the Hat is that it was born out of his frustration with the word list. He said he would come up with an idea, but then he would have no way to express that idea. So he said…: ‘I read the list three times and almost went out of my head. I said I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that will be my book. I found cat and hat and I said the title will be The Cat in the Hat.'”