Ideas, Happenings, and Shiny Things!

Sunday, June 18, 2006

A lovely game of Scrabble

 

Posted by Christa at 6:53 PM.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Where will you be on the 20th of December?

For anyone who is going to be in the Bay Area on the 20th of December, my mom wanted to give you guys first crack at tickets to see Corteo.. here's the message from her:

We bought tickets to the new Cirque du Soleil show Corteo, up in San Francisco. We bought them for the 20th of December (which is a Tuesday night) at 8:00pm, and then we found out [Molly] has to stay in New Jersey until the 24th. I was going to try to sell them on Craig's List, but I thought I would check to find out if you and 3 friends might be interested in going. I purchased 1 adult ticket, and 3 student tickets. The price on the student tickets is 82.45, the adult is 90.95, I would be willing to take $70 per ticket, I realize that is a lot of money, and you may already be planning on going to the show in San Jose. I just wanted to give you first crack at these. They are awesome seats, If you want to check on their seating chart, they are in section 105, Row H, Seats 4-7. Please let me know if you are considering them, if you know of someone who might be interested, or if you are not interested, so I can attempt to sell them elsewhere.

She would like you to let her know by Friday, which means you need to let me know by early Friday (or if you want, you could call my San Jose number, since you could contact my mom directly that way). Either way, she will try to sell them on Craig's List next, if nobody wants them!

(P.S. I'm going to see the show, still--we got new tickets after Christmas.. Rutgers can't foil me that easily!)
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Posted by Christa at 2:32 PM.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Shiny!

Just a few fun links... first, a great page of a TON of tongue twisters, which I actually got from the professor of the linguistics 101 course I'm TAing.

And then, in a more serious vein, my brother has started a new group blog for world news... each person (including me, I'm South America) is taking a region of the world and reporting on it.. this allows us to get to know the region and eventually give some more commentary and explanation of the history and current events that form the context of the news. :-)

Hope you all are doing well... I'm working away at the introduction of my QP!

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The ideas expressed on this site do not reflect the official opinions of our employers or affiliated organizations.

Posted by Christa at 8:01 AM.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

How do you say '@'?

Apparently, it is not always pronounced "at," at least in other countries. In fact, there are many more interesting ways of saying it. There is an article here and the original source is here. Some of the highlights:

Israeli: shtrudl 'strudel' [yes, the pastry]

Afrikaans: aapstert 'monkey's tail'

Czech: zavinac 'pickled herring'

Danish: snabel 'elephant's trunk'

Hungarian: kukac 'worm/maggot'

Italian: chiocciola 'snail' [note: I didn't know that this meant snail while I was in Italy... I just thought it was a funny name for the '@' sign. ;-) ]

Taiwan Mandarin Chinese: xiao lao-shu 'little mouse'

Swedish: snabel-a 'a with an elephant's trunk'

Thai: 'ai tua yiukyiu 'the wiggling worm-like character'

All considerably more interesting than "at," don't you think?

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The ideas expressed on this site do not reflect the official opinions of our employers or affiliated organizations.

Posted by Christa at 10:44 AM.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Joining the [insert three-letter acronym] is no easy job

Okay, the title of the article actually has CIA in it, but it talks about most of the three-letter intelligence agencies... one of our contributors might be particularly interested. ;-)

It was an interesting article, anyway. :-)

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Posted by Christa at 8:18 AM.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

The New World Order

I found this comic quite amusing.

I almost posted the image here, but then I didn't know if that was copyright violation or if it would just be bad netiquette, even if I properly cited it. So I decided to just link.

By the way... this is the sixtieth post on the blog! :-D

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The ideas expressed on this site do not reflect the official opinions of our employers or affiliated organizations.

Posted by Christa at 3:58 PM.

Sunday, August 07, 2005

A hundred points to anyone who can explain what ANY of this means (it's from an article on cricket):

Australia, chasing 282 to win, resumed the fourth day at Edgbaston 175 for eight, with Warne on 20, Brett Lee yet to face a ball and with apparently no chance of scoring the 107 runs needed for an unlikely win.

However, Warne and Lee, living dangerously but refusing to be cowed by some viciously fast bowling from Harmison and Flintoff, put on 45 off 56 balls.

When Warne trod on his wicket, 62 were still needed from the last-wicket pair but Lee and Kasprowicz somehow survived a barrage of short-pitched bowling to edge closer to the target, sparking pandamonium from a packed Edgbaton crowd.

With 15 still needed, Simon Jones dropped a Kasprowicz upper-cut off Flintoff at third man before Harmison sealed the nail-biting win in the 65th over.

Um, yeah. I'm lost. Just in case you want context (it doesn't help, in my opinion), it's here.
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The ideas expressed on this site do not reflect the official opinions of our employers or affiliated organizations.

Posted by Christa at 1:18 PM.