On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 11:08:34 -0400, "John Bauman"
Post by John BaumanPost by Bob CunninghamIf you'll take a few moments to read some of the stuff st
the Web site I referenced, you'll find that it's for the
most part remarks by modern contributors discussing today's
weather patterns and how they relate to those of Pepys's
time. So far as I've seen, it never quotes Pepys or even
paraphrases any of his remarks.
That's odd. On a site that states, "A new entry written by Pepys will be
published each day over the course of several years," you would expect that
entries written by Pepys would have been published every day. I expect that
his diary ran out before you got there, but you never looked back to those
entries.
I shouldn't have said "Web site". The link that I followed
went to one page of a Web site, and my remarks pertained
only to the contents of that page. Other pages at the site
do quote Pepys. In fact, I see now that there is a page
headed "Diary Archive" ( http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/
on which there are links to the diary itself for each month
starting with January 1659 and going through October 1662.
But all of that doesn't change the fact that I did not quote
Pepys, and the statement that I did was entirely false. The
poster who said I did took a giant and unwarranted leap
from a URL that had "Pepys" in it to an assumption that what
I quoted was something Pepys wrote.
In addition to providing the diary itself, the site also
publishes people's comments. The comments, like topics in
alt.usage.english, tend to wander away from the subject of
the diary, so that there are a great many entries that are
only remotely connected with anything Pepys wrote.
I quoted from one of them. It contains a link that doesn't
work, but I was able to take a piece of the URL and
eventually get to a picture (a copy of a painting by Pieter
Bruegel) showing people skating on a river in 1565. (Click
on "Image viewer" at
Loading Image....html
). The painting is related to Pepys only to the extent that
1565 was only a hundred years or so before the time Pepys
wrote his diary. (Pieter Bruegel was a famous Flemish
artist that I had never heard of. You can read about him at
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/bruegel.html )
They call the comments "annotations". There's a form at the
bottom of the page for anyone who feels like it to supply
his or her own annotation. So, in addition to being a place
to read the diary, the site is evidently also home to a
forum in which anything related to Pepys, to the time in
which he lived, or to topics in modern times that are
somehow related, or may be construed to be related, to his
time are acceptable subjects for discussion.
Incidentally, I see now that the page I cited (
http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/562.php ) has a link, directly
under the heading, called "References in the diary".
Clicking on it takes us to the statement "There are no
references to this in the diary". But I'm not sure what
they mean by "this": The heading of the page is "Weather",
and I now know that Pepys had at least one mention of the
weather in his diary.