Solonor's Inkwell

The only reality shows that I can stand are the ones like 1900 House and Frontier House, where they put modern folk into un-modern surroundings and see how they like living in the real “good old days.” The only thing I don’t get is how they continually manage to come up with people who fail to grasp the fact that they can’t just pop down to the store and buy shampoo.

Anyway, the latest of these projects is Manor House, in which one family gets to play the wealthy family in an Edwardian mansion, while a group of 14 others see what it was like to be ground under the bootheels of the British class structure of 1905. Kind of a live version of Upstairs-Downstairs.

The PBS site has a nifty quiz to go along with the series. How big a snob are you? I scored a 45. I think the Wal-Mart question pushed me upstairs a little.

Next up: Colonial House.

If you have a minute to look at some nifty photos, pop on over and help Sunidesus pick 7 pics to send in to the America 24/7 Project. The first one alone is worth the click.

It is no secret that my spouse is in love with a mutant. Yes, she’s one of those Nightcrawler groupies. She has been for years. Her one criticism of X2 was that there wasn’t enough Kurt Wagner in it.

The other thing she wasn’t thrilled with (though it wasn’t too bad) was the self-mutilation thing he had going on. In the comic, he’s got dark blue fur. In the movie, they changed it to dark blue skin with a bunch of angelic symbols he’d scarred onto himself – “One for every sin.”

She was hanging out at one of the fan sites, NightScrawlers (get it?), when she found evidence that the symbols are an actual form of writing, called Enochian. This is a language that supposedly came to a pair of alchemists in the 1500’s by way of the angel Gabriel. Pretty interesting stuff – especially if the filmmakers went so far as to research and use it properly with Nightcrawler.

Anyway, the point of this post is that she also found a nifty site that is devoted to various systems of writing, called Omniglot. It is packed with every sort of alphabet and writing system from Abkhaz to Younger Futhork. They even have 12480 (invented for use in the computer game Ecclemony). Here is the entry on Enochian.

What’s really cool is that the page for each alphabet or symbolic writing system has links to where you can download them as fonts.

Re-write the Gettysburg Address in Tagalog? No problem!

A report on the mating habits of carpenter ants done in Ogham? Piece of cake!

The sky’s the limit.

Well… they don’t have Pirillo font, but I’m sure that’s just because their experts are still trying to decipher it.