The BBC says (background info here) that Researchers in the US believe they have come closer to solving a centuries-old mystery – by deciphering knotted string used by the ancient Incas. Experts say one bunch of knots appears to identify a city, marking the first intelligible word from the extinct South American civilisation. The coloured,…
New Labour aren’t in the Bible (via Al El), but then neither are the dinosaurs, except in Florida (via Popbitch). (One of Dinosaur Adventure Land’s leading researchers is Dean “Million Volt Man” Ortner.)
“First thing we do is break their noses,” says Ukrainian cop, Igor, over at this Don Weber exhibit (via BB). I think that’s also Algerian police strategy: the Algerians who stalk tourists here tend to have omelette noses, nasty limps, parapet dentistry, you name it, while their Moroccan colleagues are usually more or less unscarred.…
For reasons that are perfectly legit and PC, I’ve got to write some phoney Arabic. I am not, of course, the first to fool around with God’s own language. The Dan Rather story is still a giggle, and The Lost City is on my Christmas list.
I’ve been doing some research on The Next Stage. I liked the bit on Stuart Simmons site (merci, Freuzel!) where he says, “People often ask if I had to drink a lot of beer to build an Earthship. The answer is no but it sure helps.” There’s no way you’d get away with proper earthships…
Just a footnote to the Boris Johnson piece: I think BJ may have put words into Judge Harris’ gob when he has him remark that it was all very well talking about a new café-style culture, where we all sit around like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, drinking slowly and moderately as we formulate…
One of the words I missed yesterday was kletskop, apparently used in Antwerp to mean “baldie”. I’ve only seen it before in the sense of “chatterbox”, but here I guess that klets is onomatopoeiac, representing the sound made by smacking a bald bonce. A while back a clown was operating outside Zurich on Plaza de…
The rest of the bullocks were taken off to be slaughtered this morning. The knacker sang to them as he walked into the yard. Some bellowed, one wailed, feeling what was coming; the vultures circled, just in case it didn’t.
While we’re on things Flemish, I’m afraid I have a tendency to disbelieve shibboleth stories. The big one in these parts is that of the brave Flemish-speakers identifying the craven French-speakers after a battle in 1302 by politely asking them to say “scilt ende vrient”. That’s debunked by Bill Poser here. An alternative version has…
Even if you stay clear of the Russian gun smugglers in the port, it’s still often very difficult to follow Antwerp dialect, with its Anglicisms (makkadam, “asphalt”), Gallicisms (memmaure, “memory”), games (‘t Chingchangsplein for Sint Jansplein, “St John’s Square”) and surreal inventions (I get halfway through melkkaarenoungdenaar, “lousy haircut”, and then lose track of what…