Oh wait: it wasn’t a hoax after all.
Why do I bother reading the news at all?

So That fancy toilet I mentioned on Monday in class turns out to be a hoax. I bought it. But to make matters worse, I believed two other widespread hoaxes exposed this week alone. Must be something in the water.

Screw ’em.. Here is a link to an article at m-w.com about American youth slang. You’ll love it and find it enlightening and amusing, I am sure. Because people are always coming up to me and bugging me about this kind of stuff.

Denim is a downloadable web design program from those crazy kids at UC Berkeley. The twist is that you can design a working website by scribblin’ it together with your tablet. Neato. I’ll have to check it out as soon as I have a free day.

Here is a funny story I heard on Mothers’ day on All things considered. It’s about a woman who inherits her late mother’s pet parrot, and how it’s almost as if Mom never moved on. It’s pretty sweet, but also interesting for linguistic freaks.

“The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it’s considered to be your style.”

—Fred Astaire, whose birthday was yesterday.

Here is a site which would have tickled some of my business-type classes pink. The show is called “How to Bow” and deals with Japanese business manners. At a first glance, it seems kind of satirical, but from what I have learned it the past, it pretty much checks out.

You decide. The cartoons are at any rate rather funny.

The world’s most widely known and most enigmatic blogger Salam Pax has started blogging again… sorta.
The young cynical lad, who lives in a Baghdad burb, has been an object of speculative fascination months before the invasion of Iraq. Cynical and eloquent, readers and journalists alike were dying to find out if this guy is for real or not.

His blog abruptly broke off in the first few days of the invasion, late March. Last week, he’s started up again.

We sighed a puff of relief. But wait a sec… There’s something fishy here. It occurred to me 1) this guy almost never makes any grammatical or idiomatic errors in his writing. That is weird, because even when one apparently speaks near perfect (second language), writing is a whole different matter. He writes at least as well as I, and much better than many native speakers you and I read on the internet.

And
2) why the hell is this guy still blogging? He’s literally had millions of readers, coverage in CNN, BBC, etc. He could easily walk up to the first ratty tabloid he sees and sell his story for a cool mil. Bestseller, baby.

The latest Gates presentation
leaves the casual reader with the need to re-read the article once or twice more just to get exactly what was being presented.

Libertarians and privacy advocates and bucketfuls of my students have expressed some reservation to certain parts of this here new-fangled stuff.

We certainly have come a long way from this.

The brothers Chaps really outdid themselves in this week’s installment of Strongbad’s Email.

Happy Birthday to late Wunderkind-turned-big-fat-jerk Orson Welles. Among other great things attributed to him, he was the inspiration for the mad scientist mouse Brain from “Pinky and the Brain”.