While searching for Aramaic dictionaries on Amazon, this came up. Note what it suggests readers may also be interested in.
Also, for your amusement, a bit of news from Germany…
A plague of Mormons
No, really. Story here. The crops have been decimated and the roads turned blood red.
This has been your random fact for the evening.
Thoughts on ethnic violence
The following is very cynical, (even by my standards) and should probably be skipped by most people.
It also talks about racism and uses the names of specific groups, so someone will probably find a way to be offended by that. Please be advised that I’m trying to think about the root causes of racism, and that therefore means bringing up various nasty subjects. Those who dislike that, please skip this too.
and…
Just to make that repair job a bit more surreal, while I was on my way there and back I was listening to the BBC on the radio. They were talking live with journalists in combat zones, who were yelling over the sound of artillery fire. At one point they had to retreat, and kept transmitting throughout.
This isn’t a bad sign about the war or anything like that – it just suddenly makes it very, very vivid that shooting is going on right now.
Sigh.
Oh, fsck…
[Hi everyone – I’ve gotten enough “signup” requests for this politics filter that it’s obviously a bit on the useless side. So if anyone doesn’t want to be on this filter, LMK instead; otherwise I’ll just say bugger it and post unfiltered]
Apparently the Prime Minster of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic, was just assassinated. (Store here)
While I know that this isn’t directly correlated with anything else going on in the world right now, there’s something deeply unsettling about assassinations of major political figures in the Balkans at this sort of moment.
Just to make things more cheerful, here are my notes from my latest “political analysis” file – it’s datestamped the 7th, and I haven’t had time to render it into human-readable form, but some of it still seems fairly relevant.
…
Still trying to come to terms with the loss of the Columbia earlier today. I was the sort of kid who borrowed the worn old copy of the shuttle’s pilot’s manual from the library, and always had it checked out even after memorizing the whole thing. And manned spaceflight has always seemed to me to be a far more important thing than, well, almost anything else. For reasons I won’t go into here and now.
Sequence of headlines:
These showed up one above the other on the front page of the NY Times. Is this meant to be a disturbing sequence?
Masters of Suicide Bombing
Salad in Sealed Bags Isn’t So Simple, it Seems
Not Your Usual Vampires, But Scary Nonetheless
Study Finds Jump in Children Taking Psychiatric Drugs
News for the day
Another news story — in particular the second of the two, which brings up the questions:
- What sort of idiot would participate in that?
- What sort of fetish makes people wish to watch that?
- And do I really want to know the answers to either of these questions?
Hopefully these three questions have piqued your interest sufficiently. I’m going to go run and hide now.
Your random news item for the day
First item on this page, sorta kinda work-safe… I can only hope that the woman in question is making this up, and working on the assumption that in Britain, it would sound normal.
OK, I really hope that she’s making this up.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 