A Few Unrelated Things
First of all, this bizarre little tidbit goes out to eronanke, who is taking a gruelling 5-hour German exam today:
Wenn du Chuck Norris fragst wie spät es ist, sagt er immer:
„Noch 2 Sekunden…“
Wenn du dann fragst: „Noch 2 Sekunden bis was?“
Verpasst er dir einen Roundhouse-Kick in die Fresse!
(Ganked from the linguaphiles community.)
I'm back in Chicago, and Winter Quarter is in its second week. This is going to be a busy quarter. Last quarter Akkadian just involved me getting spoonfed grammar and handing in the goofy exercises from the book when I felt like it; this quarter, we've jumped straight into translating Hammurabi's Law Code from the original monumental Old Babylonian script. I'm doing my homework with a group, which helps, but it is painfully slow. It takes us about 3 hours to get through 10 lines or so. We're also moving at breakneck speed in my New Kingdom Historical Texts class, which isn't too bad since it's pretty basic stuff, but I still have to have a ton of stuff prepared for every class.
Demotic (a late ancient Egyptian shorthand script, which my advisor lovingly refers to as Demonic), amazingly, is not as traumatic as I thought it would be. However, I still stand by my theory of how Demotic originated, to wit: Psammetichus I had really crappy penmanship. In order to get back at his teachers and all the people who complained about not being able to read the scribbled post-its that he left on memos to members of his court, he decreed that his own handwriting would be made the official administrative/business script of Egypt.
On a completely different note, Appius is in Pennsylvania, doing his week-long residency for his distance ed program in creative writing. He'll be heading back tomorrow, and should be here by the afternoon. Yesterday I came home and found a bouquet of a dozen red roses and a box of chocolates (from 1-800-flowers.com, with a personalized note from Appius tucked into them) sitting outside the door to my apartment, and today I got a package from him with two shirts featuring a couple of my Cafe Press designs in it. *is melty*
Well, I'd better go try to get still more actual work done. *groan*
Wenn du Chuck Norris fragst wie spät es ist, sagt er immer:
„Noch 2 Sekunden…“
Wenn du dann fragst: „Noch 2 Sekunden bis was?“
Verpasst er dir einen Roundhouse-Kick in die Fresse!
(Ganked from the linguaphiles community.)
I'm back in Chicago, and Winter Quarter is in its second week. This is going to be a busy quarter. Last quarter Akkadian just involved me getting spoonfed grammar and handing in the goofy exercises from the book when I felt like it; this quarter, we've jumped straight into translating Hammurabi's Law Code from the original monumental Old Babylonian script. I'm doing my homework with a group, which helps, but it is painfully slow. It takes us about 3 hours to get through 10 lines or so. We're also moving at breakneck speed in my New Kingdom Historical Texts class, which isn't too bad since it's pretty basic stuff, but I still have to have a ton of stuff prepared for every class.
Demotic (a late ancient Egyptian shorthand script, which my advisor lovingly refers to as Demonic), amazingly, is not as traumatic as I thought it would be. However, I still stand by my theory of how Demotic originated, to wit: Psammetichus I had really crappy penmanship. In order to get back at his teachers and all the people who complained about not being able to read the scribbled post-its that he left on memos to members of his court, he decreed that his own handwriting would be made the official administrative/business script of Egypt.
On a completely different note, Appius is in Pennsylvania, doing his week-long residency for his distance ed program in creative writing. He'll be heading back tomorrow, and should be here by the afternoon. Yesterday I came home and found a bouquet of a dozen red roses and a box of chocolates (from 1-800-flowers.com, with a personalized note from Appius tucked into them) sitting outside the door to my apartment, and today I got a package from him with two shirts featuring a couple of my Cafe Press designs in it. *is melty*
Well, I'd better go try to get still more actual work done. *groan*