cinnamon zen

They are entitled "Try One Today". They were accepted in the first round, so I sent them off to the Netherlands this week.

I hope they make it all the way, because if they don't, someone may send them back to me and then I might end up swallowing one out of curiosity, haha

Anni Albers: Pasture, 1958

There are 3 main types, but from my research, this looks to be American Gregg Shorthand.

As you can see, there are set symbols for every letter.

Let’s break one of the words down:

Using the Gregg Alphabet as reference, we can see most of the letters in “atrophied” are present. But why no “o” vowel, and why is “ph” written as “f”?

Simple. In shorthand, you cut out all vowels in a word when writing it down, with the exception of words that BEGIN or END with a vowel (hence the “a” at the start being present), or like in the “i” in “atrophied”, to make it more readable when the sound could be harder to distinguish if it isn’t written. In “atrophied” if the the “i” isn’t written, it could be hard to tell if the writer meant a “fud”, “fad”, “fod” or “fid” sound, for example.

Also, since Shorthand is a phonetic writing system, you are encouraged to write down the phonetic sounds of words rather than the actual letter blends - in this case, write an “f” instead of a “ph”.

So in actuality, these aren’t just meaningless scribbles - it’s Gregg Shorthand, a writing system developed to take down notes more quickly than when written out in full, which is very useful in a medical or journalistic environment.

Some people can even write over 100 words in a minute! And, it’s been in use since John Robert Gregg invented it in 1888! Wow! So old!

Quiet Evening Cat

imagine there was a man in the story who went around giving speeches about the importance of the lottery as a tradition. He said the casualties were unfortunate, but also an inevitable price of freedom. Imagine he treated those who sought to end the senseless cycle of violence with condescension and derision, calling them idiotic, naïve, and diseased.

yet when that man was selected for the lottery and stoned to death, everyone mourned him and said how unfair it was that a bright young family man should die so soon. And when people pointed out that this man was killed by a system he adamantly defended and worked to perpetuate, they lost their jobs and were shunned from the community as insensitive and monstrous.