Way too busy today to get much blogging done, though plenty of news to catch up on.
More soon.
Month: October 2005
Feeds
There is something going wrong with all my feeds, I am still not quite sure what the problem is. It means that my updates do not appear on POTB or Irishblogs.ie
I can’t explain it since I changed nothing on WordPress to warrant it. I will upgrade to the latest version of WordPress to see if that fixes it.
It's toolbars
Toolbars? Java, JRE and Google…
Well and Office too…at some point. And they are not pitting themselves against Microsoft. Yet.
Tasteless cartoon?
Meaning and life
I meant to post this last week but I read a very good book review in the Economist
Adam Jacot de Boinod, a BBC researcher, has sifted through more than 2m words in 280 dictionaries and 140 websites to discover that Albanians have 27 words for moustacheâincluding mustaqe madh for bushy and mustaqe posht for one which droops down at both endsâthat gin is Phrygian for drying out, that the Dutch say plimpplamppletteren when they are skimming stones and that instead of snap, crackle, pop, Rice Krispies in the Netherlands go Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!
And..
Words for work, money, sex, death and horrible personal habits may well tell you more about national attitudes than anything else. Why would Russian have a special word, koshatnik, for someone who deals in stolen cats and Turkish another, cigerci, for a seller of liver and lungs, or Central American Spanish a particular name, aviador, for a government employee who shows up only on payday?
Old jokes are often the best jokes, and many of the most amusing examples are of terrible errors that can be made in different languages: there is fart (Turkish for talking nonsense), buzz (Arabic for nipple), sofa (Icelandic for sleep), shagit (Albanian for crawling on your belly), jam (Mongolian for road), nob (Wolof for love), dad (Albanian for babysitter), loo (Fulani for a storage pot), babe (SisSwati for a government minister), slug (Gaulish for servant), flab (Gaelic for a mushroom) and moron (Welsh for carrot).
Not that The Economist does not occasionally face linguistic problems: a cover story entitled âThe meaning of Lulaâ? (see article) in October 2002 resulted in a huge mailbag, not from Brazilians who were impressed at our analysis of the recent election, but from Pakistanis eager to tell us that the meaning of lula in Urdu is penis.
This book is a gem, and there are still 91 shopping days till Christmas.
Moron is Welsh for carrot hehe. I think that will definately make a good Christmas present. Bit early to be thinking about it though.
Use it or lose it
It’s a showdown and CBC look like they could lose.
SHORTLY before the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) locked out 5,300 of its 9,000 employees on August 15th, Michele Sparling, the management’s chief negotiator, declared: âThis is the hill we will die on.â? Seven weeks later, those words look ominous. Many of CBC’s most familiar faces are on the picket line. Managers have had to fill the schedules with many inept stand-ins. Some in the media industry reckon that after the dispute ends, Canada’s public-service broadcaster may be badly diminished or even doomed.
The lockout followed 15 months of talks on a new agreement between CBC and the Canadian Media Guild, a merger of three unions. The dispute centres on the management’s desire to put more workers on temporary contracts, to give it the flexibility it says it needs to tackle multi-channel broadcasting, satellite radio and podcasting. The guild’s response is that 30% of CBC’s workforce are temps already, a higher percentage than at commercial rivals, and that the corporation needs a permanent creative core.
Election turnout in Poland
The Poles have elected a center right government, after years of left-wing parties in power, the populist Law and Justice and the free-market Civic Platform agree on the need to cut taxes, deal with bureaucracy and make a clean break. But turn out was incredibly low as the Economist notes:
Three-fifths didn’t bother to vote at all—the worst turnout in the country’s 15-year electoral history. Some cynicism is justified: most of the ten governments since the collapse of communism have promised clean, efficient government, yet delivered little. Why should another lot be any different? Meanwhile, rows that erupted in the final weeks of the campaign may weaken the new government. Civic Platform promised a 15% flat tax; Law and Justice derided that as a giveaway for the rich. It promised, expensively, to protect social welfare programmes.
New look Economist
The Economist changed their website back on October 1st, and I do like what they have done with it. It’s not all scrunched to one side like it used to be, the lines are cleaner, and it’s much easier to navigate.
Made up words in the Simpsons
A fabulous resource for Simpsons lovers everywhere. [via TCAL]
Among the all time classics:
CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet
Crisitunity
Debigulator
Jebus
Nucleon
Sacrilicious
Scotchtoberfest
Tramapoline
For explanations of these words follow the link.
Criminal activity
An admission. I rip my music CD’s using Apple iTunes and put the songs on my iPod nano. Hark it is illegal to do so in Ireland under the Copyright Act 2000. I guess this means jail for me. Will anyone come visit?