mastodon.world is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Generic Mastodon server for anyone to use.

Server stats:

8.5K
active users

#JonathanSwift

1 post1 participant0 posts today

And now for some fun with classical music. Telemann wrote this suite in 1728, two years after the Jonathan Swift classic was published, and it humorously refers to some of his creations with the music.

"Intrada Suite for Two Violins (The Gulliver Suite)," composed by Georg Philipp Telemann, performed here by uncredited artists.

youtube.com/watch?v=Ep1FdFpqU4

"The governor and his family are served by domestics of a kind somewhat unusual. By his skill in necromancy, he could call whom he pleases from the dead.... [The servants' countenances] made my flesh creep with a horror I cannot express."
- Jonathan Swift, "Gulliver's Travels"

A modest proposal about popes...

So, another pope has died and his ashes will soon be emitted from the chimney on the Sistine Chapel. It is time to select a new pope.

But the pope has presided over a seemingly endless series of scandals for generations. They keep electing new popes, but the problems never go away. Why can't they solve these problems?

Looking for commonalities among all the popes of the last century or so, one stood out to me: they're all Catholic!

Maybe they should try choosing a nice Unitarian, or perhaps a Wiccan? They'd have at least as good a chance of solving the problems as the last umpteen Catholic popes. Maybe even better.

It's worth a shot.

(V jbaqre ubj znal ercyl thlf jvyy rnearfgyl rkcynva gb zr jul gur cbcr zhfg or Pngubyvp.)

Damn you #JonathanSwift!
If you had only kept your mouth shut! 😂😂😂

> He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes.

This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

> He assured me “that this invention had employed all his thoughts from his youth; that he had emptied the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books between the numbers of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech

via #thechipletter’s latest, thechipletter.substack.com/p/t

The Chip Letter · The EngineBy Babbage