(Roughly) Daily

Putting it as simply as possible…

Try explaining something difficult or complex using only the most common thousand—sorry, ten hundred—words [the list is here]. The Up-Goer Five Text Editor isn’t a new idea (here’s a MacOS app from 2016) but now it’s on the web…

Boing Boing

Here’s your correspondent’s shot at explaining “Manichaeism”:

“Explain something with the thousand most used words in English,” via @BoingBoing.

* Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

###

As we streamline, we might send tuneful birthday greetings to an avatar of a different kind of plain speaking, Steve Jones; he was born on this date in 1955. A musician and songwriter who has recorded and performed solo, in the short-lived supergroup Neurotic Outsiders with members of Guns N’ Roses and Duran Duran, and with the likes of Johnny Thunders, Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan, and Thin Lizzy, he is best remembered as the founding guitarist of The Sex Pistols (whose songs he co-wrote with John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon and drummer Paul Cook). He ranks in Rolling Stone‘s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.”

source