One of my favorite words is "varmint." I was watching some tv show a few years ago, some forensics show about solving crimes, and there was a guy in some snooty job -- like a judge or captain of police or whatever -- and in his description of the crime, he used the word "varmint," and I just about peed my pants. "Varmint"! I pictured this snooty ( Read more... )

Happened upon Die Hard being shown on AMC this afternoon and was momentarily sucked in by Alan Rickman's sly, German-accented awesomeness, but then realized that AMC had dubbed out all the swearing. Dude! Die Hard with no swearing? DIE HARD??? That ruins some of the best lines in the movie! I mean, what's Die Hard without "Yippee-ki-yay, ( Read more... )

Tons of housework and household organizational stuff today, and now I'm wiped out. One of the things I did today was get rid of about a dozen textbooks from the lit and psychology classes I took as an undergrad ... back in 1987-1991. I finally decided that they weren't going to come in useful anytime soon -- I wasn't going to read them for fun, ( Read more... )

The word "bedridden" has always puzzled me. I mean, doesn't it sound like it should refer to someone who is rid of beds? And yet it means pretty much the opposite. Weird. But apparently it comes from bed + rider ... which makes the whole thing sound much more adventurous than it has usually been in my experience. When I'm bedridden, the last thing ( Read more... )

Ha! I had a bit of a Spike flashback this evening when reading today's word of the day on my friends list. This is for my fellow "Buffy" (or, really, human Spike) fans:

A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

effulgentPRONUNCIATION ( Read more... )

I walked about a million miles today. Okay, hyperbole. I walked about 10 miles today, but it felt like a million. I was out running errands, and I wanted to take the bus home, but I became impatient and decided to walk. I was dragging the last mile or two. I came home and took off my shoes and collapsed ( Read more... )

Today has been a day of many presents ( Read more... )

So I decided to write that post I was talking about recently, in which I post some favorite song lyric snippets, just the lines that make me laugh or cry or whatever, the lines that evoke the strongest emotions. (If you want to listen to the song, click on the link.)

( Some favorite song lyric snippets )

Okay, an interaction on Facebook kinda freaked me out today. A friend (K) posted a photo of a toy box for a knock-off "Barbie" doll, with text on the box that said things like "Everybody is quick to come to do the friend with me!!" and "High beautiful doll series" and "The doll of the high quantity." So ... embarrassingly bad translations, right? ( Read more... )

I frequently play an online card game (Gang of Four) published by a French company (Days of Wonder). Many of the players, especially at a particular time of day, are French. I've noticed that most of them use French netspeak, which makes things difficult for those of us who know only a bit of French. For example, some of them write phonetic ( Read more... )