Both my wonderful sister-in-law Jeanne (and her partner Gail) and my beloved friends Hilary and John keep chickens. In fact, Chicory — one of Jeanne and Gail’s chickens — just had four wee chicks, we hear (congratulations to all concerned). This doesn’t sound like a distinctive cause for thanksgiving, especially since we’re too far away to hit them up for fresh eggs, but I truly appreciate what they’ve done for us. If not for Jeanne and Hilary, I’d never have experienced the delight of reading through the names of different varieties of chickens.
Under what other circumstances, for instance, would one have the opportunity to refer to a “Silver Dorking”? How do shaggy residents of Gdansk feel about chickens being called “Bearded Polish”? Is there some connection between Transylvanian Naked Necks and the abusive epithet “redneck” (some naked necks are, after all, red naked necks)?
One could go on indefinitely, but my favorite — the kind John and Hilary were thinking of buying — sounds like the name of a sportswriter from the golden age of reporting: “And now, baseball headlines from our man at the All-Star Game, Buff Orpington. . . .” Someday I’m going to write a novel or a screenplay, and Buff Orpington will be a character in it.
Posted by AKMA at July 16, 2003 11:13 AM | TrackBackWell AKMA, didn't you know that our very own Henrietta, as well as the former hen-turned-out-to-be-rooster Buffy, are/were Buff Orpingtons?? I've been amiss in keeping you informed apparently. Henrietta is head chick of our 3 fowl broods and she certainly knows how lovely and powerful she is. She in fact had our neighbors' construction workers feeding her grubs by hand every day...
I do think the chicken breed namers come from the same breed as the rose hybrid namers myself.
I await your novel but expect it to reflect all due respect and understanding of any henly origins.
Posted by: Jeanne at July 17, 2003 10:14 AMAre you familiar with the delightful novels of Dorothy L. Sayers? In Busman's Honeymoon, Miss Twitterton's Buff Orpingtons are mentioned enough times to give them minor character status.
Seth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.
Posted by: Mark at January 12, 2004 10:20 PMThis will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of
Posted by: Matthew at January 12, 2004 10:20 PMOur next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.
Posted by: Albert at January 12, 2004 10:20 PMA variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.
Posted by: Margaret at January 13, 2004 12:18 PMThese secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Matthew at January 13, 2004 12:18 PMThese secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Bellingham at January 13, 2004 12:18 PM