Category Archives: humanities

a shifting role

The original Nikita (1990) and the American remake Point of No Return (1993) had a minor character called Victor the Cleaner — played by Jean Reno and Harvey Keitel respectively — whose specialty was making evidence, such as bodies, disappear. … Continue reading

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how adolescent boys talked

If you don’t remember George Carlin’s speech that contains the phrase “six sins for one feel”, go ahead and look it up. When I first heard it, the phrase “feel her up” was new to me, but its meaning was … Continue reading

Posted in language | 2 Comments

what didn’t happen in Juneau didn’t stay in Juneau

In “It Happened in Juneau”, near the end of the third season of Northern Exposure (one of very few TV series of which I’ve seen every episode twice), Maggie flies Joel to Juneau for a conference; they both get lonely, … Continue reading

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Russian runes?

Backtracking a search that led to my runes, I found this page that seems to claim that the futhark descended from a Russian system based on segments selected from the wheel graph W6. One needn’t accept the claim to find … Continue reading

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PLG

Got an idea for a transhuman story element. Assume that the technology exists to let you acquire fluency in a language of your choice as easily as you install a font on your computer. (Such technology figures in When Gravity … Continue reading

Posted in language | 3 Comments

divided by common letters

I’ve been getting Russian spams in which some of the Cyrillic letters “Аа В Ее К М Н Оо Рр Сс Т у Хх” are replaced by the similar Latin letters “Aa B Ee K M H Oo Pp Cc … Continue reading

Posted in language, spam | 1 Comment

Zurker

What do you know, yet another social website.

Posted in society | 1 Comment