French Soldier and Pervert

There are several things I'm working on at the moment, diversifying necessarily from the recent burst of anomalous lights research, including: a) publishing things via Lulu; b) working on various sites including homepage redesign, encnorm (should hack chardet into it), and some miscellaneous sites I'm excited about; and c) trying to make a What Planet entry.

Trying to do the latter has proved most frustrating of all: I thought I'd write something about a highwayman story I read some time ago about how a vicar ingeniously escaped from a robbery situation, but I couldn't find any references to it. Instead, I found an account about someone who'd been wrongly accused of being a highwayman (a highwaywoman in fact), so I thought I'd write about that, but that turned out to be pointless since most of the research had already been done on that, so I'd just be working on presentation. Presentation by itself isn't all that interesting, and one of the tenets of What Planet is that the entries should contain novel research.

All the same, this got me thinking about how women had been misrepresented throughout history, and so I got into researching that a bit, and I came up with some leads though I doubt they'll develop. I even had an idea for yet another site, along the lines of the Pepys Diary site. Anyway, eventually I settled on delineating some interesting periods of history, and then I dropped the effort to do a What Planet post.

I'm also interested in procuring some 20 year shelf life CDRs, so that I can free up a bit of hard drive space. I also have some conference papers to review, and would like to work a little on getting hAtom working perhaps on Strange Strands as a trial.

The title of this thing is via John Cowan. I recently coined the word "sighographies", regarding biographies akin to the definition of the Marquis de Sade in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary ("Fr. soldier and pevert."). One of the more ridiculous ones that we came up with was "Invented the lightningproof key. Would've made a good pirate." for Benjamin Franklin. Anyway, I thought that this might be a cran-morpheme, so I wrote in to Language Log apropos of the infogami entry which anyway needed correcting, but I found out that it was just an instance of neo-classical compounding.

I also coined pseudeme as a better word for cran-morpheme, since they're also called pseudo morphemes, according to the book Morphologie/Morphology (Booij and Lehmann, eds., 1999; p.901). I was hoping that -eme counted as a pseudeme itself, but John said it isn't any longer. Congratulations to him, also, apropos of sighographies, for completing my ghogr challenge.