Via Arnold Zwicky at Language Log, an explanation for “NPR names”, which I’ve heard mentioned in passing, and for the explanation if which I’m grateful.
NPR names
Here’s how it works: You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name. Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.
Unfortunately, “Jonathan Ken” [...]
Geoff Pullum has for some time now led the charge against Strunk and White’s “horrid little book”. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of The Elements of Style, Pullum pulls his criticisms together in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved [...]
NPR had a piece this morning on an auction of Michael Jackson memorabilia. In an interview likely conducted on or near Good Friday, we’re told that “the Holy Grail of the entire auction” is Jackson’s “crystal-encrusted white glove”.
Who is IOZ?
I See A Bad Moon Risin’
Gaymarriage will take away my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Gaymarriage will make hockey players skate on gravel. Gaymarriage will create weakly godlike artificial intelligences that will destroy you, soft, weak human. Gaymarriage will disassemble all of the planets and non-stellar matter in the solar system and create [...]
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart — HL Mencken
via Sam Smith
I grew up, in part, near the Red River, in Kittson County MN, closer to Winnipeg than Fargo. My chief memory of the terrain: flat. But I never realized just how flat until I read this in the NY Times this morning.
…the Red River, though fairly modest compared with some more famous rivers, [is] devilishly [...]
from the flickr account of one “9 0 0 0“
Time Magazine, via Barry Rithotz
Raised Dump Truck Hits Overhead Sign On I-84 In Manchester
“When [the truck] left the construction site and re-entered the highway, the dump body was upright,” said Trooper William Tate, a state police spokesman. “For obvious reasons, that’s wrong.”
via Bob Morris
…Tuesday edition. Because sometimes, you know, God just can’t wait.
Mormon beefcake
From the Chronicle of Higher Education
Brigham Young University has rejected an appeal from a student who had completed all the requirements for a degree but saw his diploma withheld last year after he published Men on a Mission, a calendar of buff Mormon missionaries without [...]
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.
— Mark Twain
Popovers are good to eat. Popovers are unpredictable. There isn’t very much to a popover. It is an ungainly-looking medium for getting butter, jams, jellies, and honey into the mouth.
The popover owes its fragile puffiness to steam levitation. It is done without yeast or chemicals of any kind. Only steam raises it high, and then [...]
A little TLS tease from Andrew Brown.
Sisters, not parent and child
An interesting and important point from John Barton’s essay on conceptions of the afterlife in the current TLS (not online):
Jews and Christians do not of course believe the same things, but the structures of the two faiths are much more similar than people think. This [...]
E B White, via Sam Smith:
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
Roger Shuy at Language Log:
The dangers of monolingualism
If ever there is a question about the need to know a few foreign languages these days, see this BBC link about the embarrassed Irish cops who have been stymied in their hunt for a serial traffic violator who went by the name Prawo Jazdy. It seems that [...]
Via Jorn Barger, a fully connected network of vices, courtesy of Indexed.
Felix Salmon.
Wine Tasting Datapoint of the Day
Robert Hodgson has a paper out entitled “An Examination of Judge Reliability at a major U.S. Wine Competition”. He had the ingenious idea of serving up three identical glasses of wine — poured from the same bottle — to groups of judges; only 10% of the judging panels managed [...]
Parnell came down the road,
he said to a cheering man:
“Ireland shall get her freedom
and you still break stone.”
— W B Yeats
In nine(!) easy steps. Who knew that getting out of a car was such a production? Hint: not us boys.