On NPR’s “Morning Edition” today I heard an interesting piece with Philip Gooden, author of “Who’s Whose, A No-Nonsense Guide to Easily Confused Words“, a book that attempts to untangle words that are commonly mixed up. (Who’s/Whose, Gourmet/Gourmand, when to use “fewer” rather than “less”, etc.)

I will order a copy, because I’m a sucker for reference books anyway, but also in hopes that he explains the weird tendency to use the words “bizarre” and “Byzantine” interchangeably, a practice I find bizarre. I guess you can make the case that, if the culture of Byzantium was complex and obscure, then its name can be used correctly as a synonym for any hopelesly tangled situation. But seriously. I don’t know one person in ten who can even correctly define what Byzantium was (or where, or who). If you assume that, then you have to conclude that the two words just sound the same (up to a point).

I was on the BBC News site, of all places, when I ran across this story about American Steve Vaught, who is walking from Oceanside, California to Rockefeller Plaza in New York City … that’s something like 2,800 miles … in what started as a bid to lose weight and, unavoidably, turned into a more personal journey. He started out north of 400 pounds and has lost over 100. (This was a little difficult to figure out from the BBC site, where all measurments were in kilograms or ’stone’ … 14 pounds per stone). He has traveled as far as Ohio, to date, and estimates another six weeks until he gets to NYC. (Follow his progress here.)

I hope the people at Apple quickly locate Steve and get him a free iPod with a bunch of video and audiobooks. He is (literally) a walking marketing machine for this … his site lists the books he’s listened to on the way. My eyebrows went up when I saw the Derek Jacobi-narrated “Odyssey” (Mandelbaum’s translation) and went on to see a wide variety of interesting spiritual and entertainment selections.

Now we are talking about Poetry. Several weeks ago, the Staff here at Extremely Late Renaissance helped to create a Web Log for Alan Van Dine, author of a recent book of Poetry and Illustration called “If Instead of Apes, We Had Come from Grapes, We Wouldn’t Just Yet Be Wine“. The site, “Light Verse for a Heavy Universe” has content from the book along with a steady diet of new stuff from Al. (One of my favorite recent entries is “Poem“, which is from the book, but there is also a cartoon from Al’s college days here.).

Sorry, but I can’t stand looking at that last post anymore, and although I have nothing particularly interesting to say, I have to take some sort of action to create the illusion of progress on this blog. I apologize in advance to my family for repeating, verbatim, a recent email. So. Spiders:

I’m just finishing a book that Joan recommended called ‘Krakatoa‘ by Simon Winchester (he wrote ‘The Professor and the Madman‘ which I know Lynn and I have read). Close to the end of the book, talking about the emergence of animal life on the new volcano that is rising up where the old one had been, he quotes William Syer Bristowe, an expert about spiders. He includes the following footnote:

“Bristowe is perhaps the most famous figure in the spider world [I’d have guessed the trickster god Anansi, or Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-man, but what do I know], known for calculating that the weight of insects devoured by British spiders in an average year exceeds the total weight of all British people combined.” [emphasis is mine]

Elsewhere (well, actually, from “The Magic School Bus Spins a Web“) I’ve learned that you are never more than 3 feet away from a spider. Christ. Now I’ll have to move.

Alex weighed in with the fact that he had read somewhere that the average person eats three spiders a year. That’s a little more like it. After all, the size advantage belongs to us. Excerpting from Al Van Dine’s poem “The Little People” (check out his blog, “Light Verse for a Heavy Universe“!):

Big Miss Muffet sits on a throne eating whatever she damn well pleases, including whoever sits down beside her. The spider leaves her alone.