Email pricing

The following pricelist was received from a spammer who thinks that a Taiwanese email address is worth 70 times as much to me as an American one. America 175 Million Email Address $220 US Europe 156 Million Email Address $250 US Asia 168 Million Email Address $150 US China(PRC) 80 Million Email Address $200 US…

Backwards words

The sports stars interviewed here by Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News confirm what every Dutch child knows already: watch television in your target tongue and you can skip those expensive and boring language classes. Different alphabets are another kettle of fish, however: “I was reading a book that Artukhin had on the bus,” Richardson said. “It was Russian.…

Shame

Igry (1/2/3) – a (research-driven?) neologism expressing a voyeuristic, laissez-faire sense of shame – already gets slightly more ghits (ca 200 to 175, once you’ve sifted out the Russians) than its Catalan equivalent, vergonya aliena, although it’s still way behind plaatsvervangende schaamte and vergüenza ajena (not to mention verguenza ajena). Nice try, but I don’t…

The economics of c => k, and so on

Just a couple of Russian daisies for the chain: One of the aims of the great Russian spelling reform of 1917 was apparently to make War and Peace shorter, thus saving paper. It is strange then that socialists in the rest of the world ended up trading c for k, which actually uses more ink.…

Cool/kewl

Following on the tense Berlin climax of the beer-from-Mars post, I suspect that the Tiergarten may also provide the key to the following excerpt from a message posted by a furriner on behalf of the nice Catalan boys and girls who dress up as squatters and spraypaint daddy’s bank (but not mummy’s 4×4) instead of…

Plague?

The two reports this morning of sudden waves of deaths in Russia in December from cold and/or respiratory complaints and Klebsiella pneumonia both sound more like residual incidences of pneumonic plague. As far as I’m aware (visibility down to three metres this morning), kids don’t usually get Klebsiella (which resembles the plague), and both cases…