Category Archives: humanities

goody linkness

John Cowan writes: There’s a Dell one and a Sun one And a Blue one and a Compaq one And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky And they all run just the same. One patient’s account of depression lifted by … Continue reading

Posted in psychology | Leave a comment

a gap in the library

Latin ecce, Italian ecco, Russian vot, French voilà, Esperanto jen — the nearest English equivalent I can think of is lo!, which is not in most bilingual dictionaries, for the same reason English-speakers know the word voilà. So how do … Continue reading

Posted in language | 2 Comments

Why can’t the English learn to speak?

Got an idea just now that might sell a few copies: Monty Python Annotated for Americans, containing answers to such questions as “What dialect is Palin doing in this bit?” This thought was prompted by watching My Fair Lady. In … Continue reading

Posted in cinema, language | Leave a comment

linky goodness

Adventures of Mr Coo, a wacky bit of Flash animation from Basque-land. (Cited by JoAnne Schmitz.) At Languagehat, some interesting brief remarks on the Belgian aristocracy’s efforts to seem less alien to Flanders. Warren Meyer on why libertarians write blogs … Continue reading

Posted in blogdom, eye-candy, language | 1 Comment

this and that

I’m sneezing up a storm today, and the good old allergy pill hasn’t helped. I do hope it’s not the same virus that afflicted my housemate for two weeks last month. Who is the center of the movie universe? Kevin … Continue reading

Posted in cinema, history, me!me!me!, race | 1 Comment

items from elsewhere

Ron Paul’s remarks on the war, to the House useful spam-handling plugin for WordPress 1.5 a gag about clashing jargons Sheldon Richman on the “Minuteman Project”: . . . this “citizens’ neighborhood watch along our border” looks for foreigners who, … Continue reading

Posted in blogdom, cartoons, humanities, race, security theater | Leave a comment

gravitas

I called a locksmith today and he said he recognized my voice’s “heavy tone” from a previous job. I wonder whether that’s a translation of a Chinese idiom. Perhaps my voice was gravelly, as it sometimes is in the early … Continue reading

Posted in language, me!me!me!, music+verse | 1 Comment