Prescience bites us in the ass yet again.

"There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other."
-John Adams (1790)

In other news, I highly recommend the book John Adams by David McCullough.

Bartleby

As I was composing an email to Carly I had to pause to look up the difference between instinctive and instinctual. As it turns out, "These are synonyms, both meaning 'caused by or characterized by instinct,' but instinctive is much more often employed; instinctual is rare, except in Britain." This definition is taken from The Columbia Guide to Standard American English.

I enjoyed that explanation for its clarity and conciseness, so I explored Bartleby.com, the website on which I found it. Bartleby is a website that hosts online copies of books. Their reference section seems pretty useful. Also, the books are posted in what appears to be HTML, meaning they could easily be copied [by some obviously nefarious character] into a format readable by certain digital reading devices; I'm not encouraging it, just noting it.

A very strange book

I enjoyed reading these excerpts of Euonia, a new book in which each chapter contains only one of the vowels (though in each chapter the chosen vowel is used many times).