Friday Links

Welcome, Hypothetical Reader, Happy Friday to you! You’ve got a mouse and I’ve got links, and you know that can’t be wrong. Let’s do this thang.

First, midlist author Ellery Adams gives some interesting personal statistics, a revealing snapshot of what it’s like to be an author. Average annual income: $18,000. Ye-ah. If we wanted to be rich, we’d be consultants.

So it looks like Levar Burton is going to lead a Reading Rainbow flash mob in singing the theme song! I’ll keep my eyes open for this, and if it happens, you’d better believe I’m posting the video.

Something cool I found: a reverse dictionary. You type in a description of the word you’re looking for, and it gives you back a list of candidate words. Great for those oh-shoot-what-is-it-called moments. I’ve given it a few test runs with specific words, and it’s worked very well for me so far.

Have you ever heard of “yugen”? It’s a Japanese term related to aesthetics, and as usual with such cases there’s no easy translation, but roughly it seems to mean “profound subtlety.” The link is to a description on Wiki. I find this kind of thing fascinating. How would our own art be different if we had words for such mysterious concepts?

Finally, not new but hilarious: a video of Doris Lessing reacting to the news that she’s won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When I get my Nobel, I’m totally doing this too.

Have a totally excellent weekend.