User:MinorProphet

The Arrival of the Armies of Wisdom, for massed trumpets and drums, from the final pages of The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Pfeiffer. To be played at high volume, when feeling happy, or even victorious. MinorProphet (talk) 01:36, 11 January 2026 (UTC)

"Hatred, promoted as heroic defiance of censorship, daring to say the unsayable, is a poisoned arrow aimed at the Achilles' heel of liberalism – its dutiful tolerance of illiberal opinion."^[1]

That's exactly one of the pillars of WP: Assume good faith. But eventually the trolls will undermine our foundations, because we are defending and not attacking: and then what? We cannot hold out for ever. MinorProphet (talk) 17:19, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

I can't remember quite how, but today I came across the German word Sprachmittler, where 'mittel' is a means or medium. And suddenly the idea of 'rendering' or even (gods forbid) 'translating' something seems happily distant, and now I know myself to be a 'language mediator' :> MinorProphet (talk) 01:21, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Schopenhauer

Pinched from Benutzer:Neun-x

„Wer etwas Sagenswertes zu sagen hat, braucht es nicht in preziöse Ausdrücke, schwierige Phrasen und dunkle Anspielungen zu verhüllen. Er kann es einfach, deutlich und naiv aussprechen, und dabei sicher sein, dass es seine Wirkung nicht verfehlen wird.“^{[citation needed]}

"Whoever has something to say worth saying, it does not need veiling in precious expressions, heavy phrases and dark allusions. It can be articulated simply, clearly and without pretension and thereby will be sure that its effect will not be missed."

Ongoing unfinished articles

• Draft subpages - this one...

Current obsession:

• Draft:Knights for the body
  • On my vague idea of creating a complete list of all Knights for the Body ever, the words of William A. Shaw in the preface to his The Knights of England pp. ix–x about collating the records of Knights Bachelor will serve as a warning:

"No words of mine can convey an adequate idea of the welter, chaos, confusion and contradictions of these manuscripts. The names of Knights are given with every possible variation, the lists disagree perpetually amongst themselves in the order of the names, and the dates assigned to the battles or other occasions on which knighthoods occur, are in the majority of cases totally incorrect. In the attempt to collate these manuscripts and to verify them from extraneous sources, I have spent four painful years, and I regard the outcome as the most distressingly unsatisfactory piece of historical work I have ever set my hand to."

List of things I REALLY REALLY should have completed aeons ago...

• MV Delius... So old,can't you finish it?
• Charles Gayno Baylor - the founder of Baylor University was his uncle, i fink
• Archimedes' cattle problem, from bibliography for Number Theory: (Needs German maths expert familiar with Fraktur)

Related to The Miracle but lost interest

• Joseph Menchen - theatre lighting man and film producer
• George C. Crager - his somewhat dodgy business partner
• Elite Sales Agency - UK distributors of the fake Das Mirakel (1912 film)
• NY Film Co. - US importers of the fake Mirakel
• Battle of the Miracles - the whole episode could have been a deliberate con, designed to draw attention to the real thing.
• Reinhardt's ‘Miracle’ at Olympia: a Record and a Reconstruction - Book about the massive stage production

Other

• The joy of sfn - attempt at to explain technical aspects of referencing - now very outdated. See Talk re reffing.
• Why are there no good chemistry jokes, only puns?
• Karl Schafhaütl, Karl Emil von Schafhäutl who invented Schafhaütl's powder, which removed phosphorus from steel

• My sandbox

    —Peruvian steel, an early type of stainless steel.— Pretty much ready for mainspace.

H. E. Porter was Harold Everett Porter (19 September 1887 — 21 June 1936). He was an author of plays, verse, novels and short stories, who often wrote under the pen name of 'Holworthy Hall', the name of a dormitory for 1st-year students at Harvard University. The following words fit fairly well to the tune of Mattinata (YouTube) by Leoncavallo.

         Opera Porteri

O carmen jadlowker dalmorès
O lucia sextetta bizet;
O dippel caruso dolores,
Gioconda, o andré-caplet.

O conti, o eames tetrazzini,
O scotti mascagni farrar.
O gadski busoni puccini,
Calvé constantino, maquarre.

Ah, verdi, pagliacc' trovatore,
Aida fremstad meyerbeer;
Pol plançon and that tells the story,
The opera season is here.

                       H. E. Porter

• Xtools - Complete info on my Wikicareer, or any other WP editor - subsitute a user name into the last part of the url.
• Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States
• IABot, archives live links in articles, and automatically adds archive params to the article refs.
• My user page for iabot
• Wikipedia:Citation templates
• |ref={{harvid|''Los Angeles Times'', July 4,|2019}}
• Help:Pipe trick
• Help:Interwikimedia links
• DABs etc.
• {{Histmerge | title of original page to be migrated from }}.
• Adobe Reader command-line params
• Online copies of The Navy List 1814 - 1884, plus Navy List to end of December 1819
• Pirsig, Robert M. (1974) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Or maybe Easy Rider: but which came first? But if you had read, marked and fully inwardly digested Fear and Loathing then the question would be moot. OR: In which film at around 00:26:00? does some random yee-hah cop take aim at a still shot of Easy Rider at around xx:xx:xx? Hey, y'all don't at rush at once, gimme some breathing space
• Wikipedia:Blow it up and start over - sometimes you come across an article that reads like someone got dressed by putting their overcoat and galoshes on first, and then attempted to put everything else on in an entirely random order. Every sentence is somehow wrongly phrased; every ref is malformed in some way; there is no flow, no over-arching consistency. It's like the townie who asks a local leaning on a gate, "Excuse me, my man, how do I get to such-and-such a place?" — "Well, moy dear, Oi wouldn't be a-staartin' from 'yere."
• Wikipedia:Etiquette, to be read every week.  2017-05-9 •  2017-05-29 (oops, missed a couple of weeks) •  2017-06-6 • (wiki-break) NB Remember the Golem Rule: Clay is cool. •  2017-09-24 •  2017-10-10 •  2017-11-23 (It is possible to be too bold). Well, I used the words 'assholes' and 'wankers' to define the editors whose combined efforts resulted in the almost fact-free entry on List of dates for Easter#Latest Easter. Fail, I imagine. "Treat your fellow productive, well-meaning members of Wikipedia with respect and good will." But suppose they are being counter-productive? And how to prove it?  2018-02-20 •  2019-10-17 (inc. various w/breaks, sheer laziness etc.,) but WP:Disinfoboxes made me chuckle. What about WP:Disarticles? •  2020-02-02 at 02:02 am approx. Please do not bite the regulars, which I recently managed not to do. WP:Forgive and forget? Just give up, more like.
  • Etiquette revisited: Maybe just to be read every so often, my timekeeping is atrocious. 2020-04-28

A:

a) Yes

b) No

c) Black

d) White

Q:

Is a panda?

Zen in a nutshell

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, carry wood, chop water.

Advanced Zen

"Why are there things, instead of nothing? If we sit perfectly still, will the answers come?" Lethal Tender, 00:04:45

"Silence is the beginning of wisdom." 01:04:00

"Good night, sweet prince. What a traitorious dog I am. But a rich traitorious dog." 01:11:40

"...And the transition from life to death is swift: so enjoy yourself." 01:22:22

"Bullet-proof vest - never leave home without 'em." 01:22:36

"Wow - what a rush!" 01:25:00

Cast list - 01:26:20

• "Well, according to the evidence, you're an asshole and a troll, Barry." quote by User talk:Giraffedata
• "Please do not have the gall to tell me to be reliable, when this website is a gargantuan void of misinformation." Talk:Panzer IV
• "There are malicious people who would insert clearly false claims without legitimate basis, and claim that they in fact knew that Saddam Hussein was the fourth member of Busted." User talk:Redrose64
• "Sorry, discussing should have been in quotes. In the way that a neighbor would discuss upkeep of a fence by writing in smeared fecal matter on your garage door." User talk:MB/Archive 7
• "I'd forgotten quite why I resolved years ago, like so many, to avoid getting drawn into any talk page you were engaged in. Now you remind me." WP Talk:Manual of Style/Images
• "The photo in user page is very ugly and against Wikipedia policy" User:Serial Number 54129
• "PLEASE listen to me, you MUST NOT delete my edits, they are perfectly acceptable and valid, you are extremely stupid." User talk:Stepho-wrs
• "I give up. You were right all along, and I've just been taking the piss." ^{[citation needed]}
• "I do speak English and my English perfectly very good. Maybe you guys misunderstood for what I commented." Shamelessly pinched from User:BrownHairedGirl, alas
• "This is one of many WP articles which apparently thinks it is wrong to give a simple example of what is meant." Talk:Monophyly
• "There is no need to damn good research because it was done by a lamentable human being." The Bugle, March 2013 by Prioryman

• Nevertheless, I'm more and more tempted to start awarding the WikiPile™ to those whose esteemed efforts in this remote corner of accumulated nonsense appear to be laudable, but who—under examination—turn out to be mere WP:WikiWankers or even WP:WikiShits. You know who you are. Or were, Francis Schonken.

• Etiquette revisited: Maybe just to be read every so often, my timekeeping is atrocious. 2020-04-28

Other fave quotes

• Artur Nikisch to Albert Coates aged around 25, at the Leipzig Opera c.1904: "The conductor’s stick seems insufficient for your feelings, Coates. You’d better take a whip!"
• On a certain writer: "Useful information is not his core business." This dates from 1895:

"The little coterie with whose labours I am about to deal has forced itself into public notice. Appealing at first to but a small section of the cognoscenti, Charles Ricketts, Charles Hazelwood Shannon, Lucien Pissarro, Reginald Savage, Sturge Moore, and others, have slowly but surely advanced. True is that the man in the street knows them not, nor does the Philistine aspire to understand them; but that is because they have not courted the glare of publicity, and have been content to discover and emend their own imperfections, to work out their own artistic salvation, unknown, save to a few. [My italics]

One of these "few" was 'Theocritus', a pseudonym for an unknown writer whose elaborate style demonstrates that "useful information is not his core business." Source: Charles Ricketts & Charles Shannon by Paul van Capelleveen.
Shannon made a lithograph portrait of Savage reproduced in "The Vale Artists. IV.-Reginald Savage". The Sketch, vol. IX, 24 April 1895, p.683 (Hathi Trust). See also , , , p. 112 De Herleving Der boekkunst in Engeland re Vale artists, mentions Savage on p. 131 (in Dutch/Flemish)