This is an excellent distraction: Free Rice! Quiz your vocabulary, learn new words, play with a rather addicting website, and donate rice via the UN to end world hunger. Ah, an Internet toy with a positive benefit for everyone!
Category: media
While waiting for a light to change, I noticed an Allstate Insurance billboard. Over a (rather weathered) picture of highway traffic, in large, un-missable letters: “MISTEAKS HAPPEN.” I spent the entire cycle of the light wondering if I was misremembering how to spell or if the designer of the billboard was being “subtly clever”. Not to go on some long rant about the collapse of decent society as we know it or anything, but does anyone else want to carry around a large red pen and fix all the various linguistic mistakes out there? Does no one know how to …
Finally! Someone has made a social networking site that I can get excited about! I’ve poked around at some of the social networking sites before, and I have a couple of profiles out there. I usually forget about them until one of the sites sends me an update email, “We’ve added wacky new features!” But, this one I’ll probably be on a lot. It’s the social networking site for obsessive readers (ie, me!): GoodReads. Find the books you’ve read, rate them, comment on them, find other people who like the same books you like, organize your books into any categories …
English is a fun language, being the hodge-podge that it is. We have so many different words that mean more or less the same thing. But there are still some things we have to use lots of words to say. And, wouldn’t you know it, there are other languages that have nice, concise ways of getting the idea out there without taking all week to say it. Here are my favorites, but the full list is worth checking out. Kaelling (Danish): a woman who stands on her doorstep yelling obscenities at her kids. Pesamenteiro (Portuguese): one who joins groups of …
Jann Arden, one of my most very favorite musicians came to town, and I took Caitlyn to see her in-store performance at our downtown Borders. Caitlyn loved the parts where everyone clapped. After the performance, I stood in line with a CD to get it autographed. I’ve never done this before. I’m, oddly, hesitant to actually go and meet these various (and variously) famous people, authors and musicians and even the occasional actor who are somehow important to me. I want to believe that the famousness doesn’t matter, that they are just regular people with the good fortune to do …
We watched V for Vendetta over the weekend. I wonder if in fifty years we will look back on it as an amusing celuloid fiction or as prophesy. I wonder if it will take fifty years before we know.