Thwart Evil!

I bet this was fun to do. We need more people to do this. Although I do not understand why the Parking meter lady was upset. It's not like her pay is dependent on how many cars she tickets, is it?

It's hard to propagate love?

Read this line today and it does make you think:

Then this one guy came along and said we should all love each other and get along. So we killed him.

Most of you will likely think that it pertains to Jesus Christ. But if you think about it, it applies to people like Martin Luther King as well.

Aah Love...

A Recent Construct

This one is among the phrases that I like and I should use it more often. Or least when I can: 'a recent construct'. For e.g.:


It's traditional for children's stories to be screwy. Think of what life was like hundreds of years ago. Childhood as this specific phase where people are coddled and treated like special snowflakes is quite a recent construct.

THRYFIH - Things That Restore Your Faith In Humanity

Item on the local news about a guy in Blackpool who withdrew £1,000 in cash from a bank to pay his car insurance. A gust of wind blew it all out of his hands and down the road. He went and sat in his son's car shocked at what had happened and without a clue what to do when there was a tap on the window. Loads of people were lining up to give him his cash back having chased it down the street and picked it up. He counted up what he got back and it came to £980. 


Of course, there are only a few places on Earth where this would happen.

English is a narcissistic language?

I read somewhere that English could be considered a narcissistic language since we tend to capitalize the "I" in sentences whereas in German, the "You" is capitalized. Also, in the Dutch language it seems it is rather impolite to begin a letter with "I".  Other interesting tid-bits:

• There's no such thing as a run-on sentence in Chinese.
• In most American stories, an owl is considered as a wise animal. In Pakistani culture, owl's are considered very foolish. If you called someone an owl in Urdu (the Pakistani language), you would be basically calling them a fool.
• The english language allows us to turn anything into a verb: "I'll Chuck Norris that asshat".
• Alphabet is literally the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta crammed together. Remember to learn your AB's!
• Urdu, the main language spoken in Pakistan, sounds like Hindi, but is written in the Persian/Arabic script. This leads to the weird situation where an Urdu-speaker is able to understand everything a hindi-speaker says, but can't understand anything written in Hindi, and can read passages in arabic (without understanding it), but can't understand spoken Arabic.
• Sanskrit, the prototypical language of south Asia shares more words with Greek and Arabic than you would think. For instance, Alpha in Arabic is Aliph, and the sankskrit alphabet also starts with an A sound. Moreover, complete words which weren't just grafted into one another at the turn of the century when civilizations collided are shared among these languages.
• In english it's "gold-digger" while in french it's "diamond-biter".
• Spell the word "socks" in English, and you're speaking a sentence in Spanish. Ess oh see kay ess Eso sí que es That means "it is what it is".