Top Ten Strangest English Words

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Top 10 weirdest English words
25.09.2007 Source: URL: http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/97646-weirdest_english_words-0

1. Floccinaucinihilipilification - "the act or habit of estimating or describing something as worthless, or making something to be worthless by deprecation".

With 29 letters, it is the longest non-technical word in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which presents it as "enumerated in a well-known rule from the Eton Latin Grammar". The OED dates its first use in literature at 1741 in William Shenstone's Works in Prose and Verse: "I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money".

2. Mesonoxian - of or related to midnight.

3. Tyrotoxism - poisoning by cheese or any milk product.

4. Zabernism – an obsolete word meaning 'the abuse of military power or authority; unjustified aggression'. From the name Zabern, the German name for Saverne in Alsace, where in 1912 an overeager German subaltern killed a cobbler who smiled at him.

5. Rastaquouere - a social climber.

6. Finnimbrun - obs. rare a trifle, a gimcrack.

7. Lamprophony – loudness and clarity of voice.

8. Mungo - a dumpster diver, one who extracts valuable things from trash.

9. Erinaceous - of the Hedgehog family; like, or characteristic of, a hedgehog.

10. Selcouth - unfamiliar, rare, strange, marvelous, wonderful. For example: The List Universe is such a selcouth website!

Source: listverse.com

Watching the Pictures Go By

I have a new hobby - watching as pictures are uploaded to Google's Blogger program. I use it, lots of people use it, and now you can watch as pictures are uploaded to all of these blogs. You can slow them down or speed them up, you can see the information surrounding them (user profile, story they are linked to) or not.

The site is http://play.blogger.com/

Here is what Google says about it:

Shortly after Blogger launched photo uploading two years ago, one of our engineers whipped up a web page that would show us the pictures that were being uploaded in real time. The result was fun, often beautiful, but above all, compelling. We couldn’t stop watching.

Over the years we’ve kept this photo scroller as part of the Blogger offices, on a monitor or projector, as an interesting (distracting?) slideshow, and a reminder of the diversity and vivaciousness of Blogger blogs. The fame of the scroller spread within Google, until one day we were asked, “so, when are you launching this?”

“Um...,” we replied. But we knew a good idea when we heard one. We got our UI people to come up with buttons and fadey effects and we got our engineers to make the whole thing fast and robust. A bit of work later, and now we can share it with all of you:

http://play.blogger.com/

Blogger Play will show you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it. We also wrote a Blogger Play FAQ with more information.

Farewell, Marcel Marceau

A true giant of performance has passed from this world.

Marcel Marceau is dead.

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7009189.stm

Legendary mime artist Marcel Marceau, who has died aged 84, captivated the world for decades.
He epitomised the silent art, eliciting laughter and tears from audiences around the world.
"Mime, like music, knows neither borders nor nationalities," he once said.
"If laughter and tears are the characteristics of humanity, all cultures are steeped in our discipline."
Marceau was best known for the melancholy, engaging clown Bip, who he created 60 years ago.
With a stripy top, white face, and limp red flower in his battered silk hat, he charmed with his deft silent movements, and mercurial expressions.
Off stage, Marceau was known as an witty, chatty and generous man.

Marceau was born Marcel Mangel in the Alsatian town of Strasbourg on 22 March 1923.
He was brought up in Lille, where his Jewish father was a butcher.
When World War II came to France, his father was captured and sent by the invading Nazis to Auschwitz, where he died. In 1944 Marceau joined his elder brother in the Resistance, later joining the French Army.

Inspired by the great US actors of the silent film era, Marceau began to study acting in 1946 under Charles Dullin and the great mime teacher Etienne Decroux, who also taught Jean-Louis Barrault.
It was in Marcel Carne's 1947 film Les Enfants du Paradis, starring Barrault, that Marceau - who played Arlequin - first became known as a mime artist.

His talents were spectacular. I remember watching him on the Ed Sullivan show as a young boy and marveling at his ability to communicate complex ideas in silence. As a person destined to have a life focused on speech, I was very early on entranced by a communicator who never used his voice.

Many others have agreed with me.

From http://www.culturevulture.net/Theater/MarcelMarceau.html

A seventy-six year old man, whose only special effects are the ones he creates with his own face and body, without speaking a word, accomplished last night what neither Lotfi Mansouri nor George Lucas nor Michael Tilson Thomas can do: He kept a San Francisco audience so thoroughly enthralled that there was not a sound in the theater - not a whisper, not a cough, not the proverbial pindrop. Absolute silence. (Oh well, Jan Wahl did drop her purse at one point.)
Marcel Marceau is the world's greatest mime - and there are no runners up. His name is synonymous with that of his highly refined art. Mime is sort of the wordless poetry of the theater, using facial expression and dance-like movement to evoke a mood, a character or situation cameo, or a whole story with no verbal content at all. There is a parallel in silent film, where the challenge of nonverbal communication was technologically built into the form, and, indeed, Chaplin and Keaton, et. al., are acknowledged influences on Marceau.

Here are a few quotes from Marcel Marceau.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marcel_marceau.html

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?

I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man's destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth. I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish.

In silence and movement you can show the reflection of people.

It's good to shut up sometimes.

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.

Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.

Never get a mime talking. He won't stop.

To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.

What sculptors do is represent the essence of gesture. What is important in mime is attitude.

Farewell, mon ami.

I Still Have Fun with Radio

This last weekend I had some spare time and instead of getting ahead on many of the tasks that lie before me, I spent a good amount of time playing with my old radio programs.

I was a dj on WRUV-FM in Burlington for 17 years. I did a Wednesday 3-hour radio program with the first 90 minutes for reggae and the second 90 minutes for whatever kind of strange acoustics I felt I needed that week. It was a great experience and I loved it each and every week. Unfortunately, as my schedule became more and more crammed and my international travel increased exponentially, I knew that it was time for change. I stopped doing radio in 2000. I had, however, been fairly manic about preserving as many of these old shows as possible. I remember that I usually bought the better metal cassette tapes to record them on, and I tried to say with date of the program within the first few minutes.

I spent a long time organizing and then encoding them into mp3 files. I still am not done. I estimate that I have about 1400 total programs. It actually felt good to throw out each cassette as I encoded it and put it on a hard drive (I also kept CD or DVD data disks).

Then I realized that I had a huge number of radio shows, and while most of them had "names" most of them were unknown acoustic territories. In December 2006 I created a blog page for each of the two shows (Reggae Lunch and College of Musical Knowledge) and started uploading them to a server and one by one putting on descriptions and links to each show. This means that I have to listen to them and try and list all of the artists, so people have some indication of what they are getting when they download.

This last weekend was the first time in a while I went back to listening to them and putting a few more of them online. I really enjoyed it. There are always great songs that I have forgotten about, and I meet them anew when I listen. I am also surprised that I sound so young (in 1983, what do you expect?), I enjoy hearing station identification spots from my young daughter and others, I enjoy hearing my mixing and selecting skills grow and I even enjoy listening to the news (it sounds better 20 years later).

If you want to check it out and download a few, please feel free.

College of Musical Knowledge
http://collegeofmusicalknowledge.blogspot.com/

Reggae Lunch
http://reggaelunch.blogspot.com/

The whole lot of mp3s can be found at the server, but without descriptions, with the latest to be uploaded at the top of the list
http://www.uvm.edu/%7Easnider/listen/?M=D

Baby Green is on the Way

My daughter, Sarah Jane, and Justin Green have announced that they are expecting a "Baby Green" and Sarah has established a website at
http://sarahjustinandbabygreen.blogspot.com/

Here is her second post, which concerns good things about being pregnant.

So, last night was a long tirade about how being pregnant sucks. And there are two sides to the coin I suppose and some really good things about being pregnant.

10. Vivid Dreams- I didn't dream very much before I was pregnant, so the nightly adventures are nice. I have dreamed about parties with friends that I don't see very often, vacations in exotic places and the BABY- the baby has twice been a boy and once a girl in my dreams.

9. Beer tastes terrible- this is a good thing- it saves money, I did spend a lot of money on Beer. I can also be sure that my growing belly is indeed not a beer gut.

8. Shopping! Yup, I get to buy all sorts of cool things- cute maternity clothes and all sorts of stuff for the baby. Although this likely offsets any money we may be saving on beer.

7. I can eat whatever I want- hopefully soon things will taste good agian and I can totally pig out. But in the meantime- Justin can't really be upset about my daily trips to Panera because its the only thing I can eat.

6. My family is really excited for me, and I'm pretty excited for them. Our parents will be grandparents for the first time and I am excited to make grandparenthood a reality for them.

5. I eat breakfast now! I never ate breakfast before. I am definitely leading a more healthy lifestyle than ever before.

4. No cleaning the cat litter! I am not allowed to clean the cat litter due to risk of Taxoplasmosis which can kill the baby. So, Justin is stuck with that chore for quite some time.

3. Big boobs! I have always had the tineiest boobs-I don't even know what it is like for a bra to be too small. Pregnancy offers an opportunity to see how the other side lives. And, I am sure when my breasts return to their previous size, I will have a greater appreciation for my little boobs.

2. Quitting smoking- while difficult is a neccessity during pregnancy and here's to hoping that when the pregnancy is all said and done, so will be my smoking habit!

1. Umm, did I mention we are having a baby? And in my dream last night it was a completely perfect baby that was really really cute!

The Aral Sea Shrinks, and Disease Spreads

The picture tells the story

Philip Mickin reports in 1988:

The Aral Sea in the Soviet Union, formerly the world's fourth largest lake in area, is disappearing. Between 1960 and 1987, its level dropped nearly 13 meters, and its area decreased by 40 percent. Recession has resulted from reduced inflow caused primarily by withdrawals of water for irrigation. Severe environmental problems have resulted. The sea could dry to a residual brine lake. Local water use is being improved and schemes to save parts of the sea have been proposed. Nevertheless, preservation of the Aral may require implementation of the controversial project to divert water from western Siberia into the Aral Sea basin.

From the BBC:

If ever there was an example of manmade ecological and human catastrophe, the Aral Sea and the dusty, salt-encrusted lands around it must be the most vivid anywhere on the planet.
In fact, it is no longer true to talk of the sea as a single entity. In the late 1980s, its level fell so low that the centuries-old body of water divided into two.
In the last eight years, the sea has fallen another 5m (16ft) and soon you can expect official confirmation that the larger of its two parts has been divided again.
What is left when these seas retreat is a vision of environmental apocalypse: vast stretches of desert, laden with heavy doses of salt and burdened with a toxic mix of chemical residues washed down over the decades from the farms upstream.
Gone are the cooling breezes that once made the town of Muynak attractive.
This fishing port used to boast busy docks and the largest fish processing plant in the Soviet Union.
Now the sea is only reached after a long day's driving over harsh terrain. The jobs have disappeared and even the cleanest water is dangerously salty.
Dust blows everywhere and carries with it toxins that enter the food chain.
The impact on public health is devastating. Malnutrition is rife as are conditions including anaemia and TB.
Most alarming is a rate of a particular form of cancer - cancer of the oesophagus - that is the highest in the world.

CONSEQUENCES OF SHRINKAGE
Aral has moved 100-150km away from the original shore
Fishery - 44,000 tonnes per year - has totally collapsed
42,000 sq km of new salty desert emerged since 1966
Diseases - cholera, typhus, gastritis, blood cancer
Highest child mortality rate in the former USSR
Up to 80% of cancer victims in the region suffer this form of cancer.

Heroin-Addicted Elephant

My daughter Sarah Jane sent me this one.

From http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/44044/story.htm

Heroin-Addict Elephant to Rejoin Herd After Rehab
BEIJING - A once drug-addled elephant fed heroin-laced bananas by illegal traders will soon return to the wild after being weaned off his addiction through methadone and round-the-clock care.

"Big Brother", a bull elephant that once "lived peacefully" with his herd near the China-Myanmar border in Yunnan province, was caught by traders in 2005, the China Daily said on Thursday.

"To control it so that it could lead the herd to where they wanted, the traders kept feeding it bananas laced with drugs," the paper said.

The traders, however, were caught trying to sell Big Brother and his herd after a tip-off to forest police.

By that time Big Brother had developed a raging heroin addiction and posed a danger to people if denied its fix, the paper said, citing police.

A drooling and twitching Big Brother had to be transported to a special park in the neighbouring island province of Hainan for treatment, after cold turkey proved so tortuous at a local centre that "even its iron chain could not contain it", the paper said.

After being diagnosed a heroin addict, park authorities in Hainan spent a year gradually weaning "Big Brother" off its dependence through methadone, regular bathing and massage.

Now clean, Big Brother will soon be returned home, the paper said.

Story Date: 31/8/2007

When One Door Closes...

...another one opens. Thus, Doctor Who takes a hiatus so now we have the Sarah Jane Adventures.

From http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKL0661580320070906

Doctor Who fans who can't wait for the time traveller's next TV appearance at Christmas will be able to watch the adventures of one of his former companions from the end of September, the BBC said on Thursday.

Actress Elisabeth Sladen will reprise her role from the 1970s as one of the doctor's best known assistants, journalist Sarah Jane Smith, in a 10-part spin-off from the long-running science fiction series.

She will star in "The Sarah Jane Adventures" to be broadcast on BBC 1 and children's channel CBBC.


The move follows her reappearance in an episode of Doctor Who last year.

"It's great to be back enjoying Sarah Jane with some fantastic new adventures," said Sladen.

"There's still so much more to find out about her after all these years."

Executive Producer Russell T. Davies said: "This is a wonderful opportunity, to use all our Doctor Who resources here in Cardiff for the making of a brand new drama for CBBC."

Doctor Who himself returns to screens on Christmas Day with a special episode starring David Tennant as the doctor and Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue in a guest appearance.

The fourth season of the latest reincarnation of the series will air next Spring but after that Tennant is taking time off to do stage work.

The fifth season will therefore be delayed until 2010, the BBC has said.

What's happening at Burning Man?

A giant explosion to delight the masses. A wood oil derrick blown up to make a statement about oil.

For more information about Burning Man go to
http://www.burningman.com/

Doctor Who 2009 & 2010 News

I took the news hard. Instead of a season of Doctor Who in 2009 we will get three specials and then a full season in 2010.

From http://www.theage.com.au/news/tv--radio/twoyear-time-warp/2007/09/05/1188783280942.html

Two-year time warp for Doctor Who fans

Doctor Who fans will have to endure a two-year time warp in between the next two series of the hit TV show.

The BBC has announced plans to make a fifth series of the time lord's adventures, but it won't hit TV screens in Britain until 2010, with Australian fans possibly facing an even longer wait.

A fourth series has recently finished being filmed and is due to be screened early next year in Britain.

But instead of the fifth series going to air in 2009, fans will have to make do with a series of three Doctor Who specials starring the current doctor, David Tennant.

Christmas specials will also be screened this year and next.

The delay in between the fourth and fifth series is believed to be linked to Tennant's desire to play Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company between July and November next year.

However, it is unknown whether the Scottish actor will return to star as the popular time-travelling timelord for the fifth series.

Tennant took over the role from Christopher Eccleston, who quit after the much acclaimed first series of the revived show began in 2005.

Australian pop princess Kylie Minogue has recently finished filming this year's Doctor Who Christmas special with Tennant in Wales.

She stars as a waitress aboard the ill-fated Titanic.

Meanwhile, Freema Agyeman, who played the doctor's assistant Martha Jones in series three, will return mid-way through series four.