Tag Archives for bookhenge

Self-Promoting Bookhenge

solving stonehenge

photo by akent, sent in by Sean Johnson

You know how when you get too many calls promoting a politician you like, you start to think you may not vote for him, or when there are too many annoying adverts for a product, you swear you’ll never buy it? Well, on sites related to Stonehenge lately, plugs for the book  Solving Stonehenge have become so frequent and insistent that we resolved to ignore them as much as possible.

Then someone (possibly related to the author) sent us this picture and we found ourselves in a bind. Do we ignore a perfectly good replica photo or do we post it and fall into being additionally annoying to people already wearied of hearing about this book? We came up with a brilliant solution:  post it and whinge about it. A good whinge now and then is therapeutic.

Don’t get us wrong–this could be a decent book for all we know. There are so many people who have come up with a brilliant theory for what Stonehenge was and did that one more doesn’t hurt anything. As a matter of fact here’s our theory: Stonehenge was built to generate as many completely bonkers theories as possible. Maybe we should write a book!

Score for this replica: 4½ druids (it’s just trilithons). Wow, we feel better! What else can we whinge about?

Bookhenge, or Henging with the OED in the Maritimes

oed-henge

Photo by John  “the Bookmonger” Doull, with permission

Sorry for the late post! We are crying in our utterly un-beerlike beverage this evening after being turned down–representatives of an artist who created a vaguely Stonehenge-like sculpture not only denied us photo permissions but asked that we never reference the sculpture on our blog as the artist had no intention of referencing Stonehenge. *sob!* So if and when we ever end this blog, there will always be at least one structure out there that people will think we missed! Still, we do respect artists, so that’s that.

Anyway, on to the matter at hand and that matter is–The Oxford English Dictionary. We assumed when we started this that there would be a lot more bookhenges than there are, books being squarish things and, in many homes at least, always at hand. So we’ve kept our eyes peeled for a bookhenge worth posting and along came this bit of poetry with a lovely late (or is it early? Wait, book lover, right? Late it is, then!) Nova Scotia light giving the books and the sand a rosy glow.

The sand and the implication of leisure time begin to set up a scene of peace and relaxation until we remember to imagine someone lugging a bunch of old dictionaries out there and building a henge when they could have been taking a romantic sunset walk. Hmmm, what manner of people are these? Perhaps a bit too much like us.

And what do they get for it? How many druids can we give for such a rudimentary construction? These are hardy northern souls and they can take the bitter disappointment of getting no more than 4 druids for their bit of OED play. Now, who can help us get the verb “to henge” into the next edition?!