Victory!

On with the quo­ta­tions obses­sion project. I swear, it’ll be use­ful for some­thing oth­er than keep­ing me busy. Someday!

Does any­body know PHP/MySQL well enough to help me do that?

Any­way, one rea­son that I keep going is lit­tle suc­cess­es like the one I just experienced. 

I love research, and I’m attempt­ing to find infor­ma­tion on every sin­gle author (8,353 at this very moment) and some kind of cita­tion, prefer­ably orig­i­nal, for every quo­ta­tion (34,444 of them). Yes, that will keep me busy for a while. The fact that many peo­ple cut-and-paste bits of text from all man­ner of sources, then lump them all togeth­er with lit­tle or no attri­bu­tion, makes me crazy—especially since it seems that vast num­bers of peo­ple con­flate Oliv­er Wen­dell Holmes Junior and Senior, or Alexan­dre Dumas père et fils.

Any­way, there’s one quo­ta­tion cred­it­ed to “Mil­ton Acor­da” all over the inter­net and in many books: “With­out free­dom, no one real­ly has a name.”

Oth­er than the one sen­tence, the man does­n’t exist. I’ve looked for him sev­er­al times, to no avail.

I don’t know if the book I found in Google Books was­n’t there before or what, but tonight I hap­pened to search on the quo­ta­tion itself again, and voilà! It’s the last line of a poem, “Pro­posed Ded­i­ca­tion for a Mon­u­ment to Lount and Matthews,” pub­lished in the book More Poems for Peo­ple by Mil­ton Acorn.

No, my work isn’t going to end world hunger or any­thing like that, but I find it sat­is­fy­ing. And every lit­tle win helps my over­all atti­tude, which isn’t real­ly pos­i­tive most of the time late­ly. Now if only some­one would pay me to do this sort of thing!