Category: Misc Stuff

Mike Rowe should have been there.

I know I haven’t blogged in quite a while (a week) or done a podcast.  Cyndi and I were able to get out of town last week and we were gone over the weekend.  We’ll get the podcast done this week and posted…it may be a tad longer than normal.  We’ll also post the pictures of our trip (there aren’t many…sorry).  But, as a teaser, here is us.  Eating Chinese Food.  Overseas.  And it was good.  It wasn’t a buffet (like the Super King in Richmond), but it was good.  And they had Chopsticks.

 Before you ask, yes, we did take Lydia…she was sitting off to Cyndi’s left.  I don’t know why we didn’t put her in the picture too.  She was there.

This morning, there was a show on Discovery called How’d they do that.  They usually talk about generic things, but today they shoed how beaver pelts are taken from “buck” form (is that what you call the pelt that has been stretched by the trapper.  Also shown on the left.) and made into a finished form that will be sent to a garmet manufacturer.  It was very interesting.  If I had it to post for everyone, I’d post it….Alas, I don’t.  Sorry.

… enjoy a free taco on the afternoon of the 28th at Taco Bell.

Also look here here here and here. I don’t think it is a scam.

Image from TW Colins

Last night we had a real treat at language class: a guest! A few weeks ago, our teacher had told us about a friend of hers who was back in town. She had been here, but moved to London for work. We mentioned that we would like to meet her, and then left it like that. Well, last night, this girl came into language…and then Marijana told us who she was.

The first wrods out of her mouth were amazing…her British accent was…how should I say…spot on 🙂 At least to my American ears, she could pass for being a Britisher…no problem. Then, we asked how long she had been in London–in Serbian, of course–and found out she had been there for 9 months. We thought she had been there for a period of years…not just months. I was floored and thrown off balance the entire time because of this. I was just fascinated with her accent.

After more conversation, it turns out that in university she had studied linguistics and worked long and hard on her accent. We were able to talk about 1/2 and 1/2 English/Serbian with her. But more importantly, for me, she gave us some good pointers on accent development. I think the biggest or most important one was spending time observing where people put their tongue and shape their mouth. Then, practice practice practice in front of a mirror till you get it right.

So, if you are headed overseas, think about that. I’d say if you could get a video of your language teacher saying a bunch of words, then you could simply watch that and practice. Perhals you ought to have two cameras…one to focus on the mouth (a close-up type shot) and one to focus on general mannerisims. Then, you could get both subleties of non-verbal communication as well as that extreme close-up of the mouth, tounge, and lips.

Oh, you are probabaly wondering why the candy corn picture. Well, our friends from VA who came brought us tons of stuff. Part of what they brought us was candy corn. We took some to language last night to share with our language teacher. Turns out, she loved it (who doesn’t like sweet stuff). We also shared some pumpkin–well, sort of–with her. But, I’ll leave that for another post (we have pictures to share about making it).

These two videos helped me understand some of what is going on.  Here you go:

{vimeo}1876936{/vimeo}

{vimeo}1915392{/vimeo} 

Just like with the Master Life Prayer Guide , today’s lesson made reference to some things in the back of the book.  Again…instead of simply copying the page to use, I whipped up in about 15 min an electronic copy.  Since I did that, I thought I would go ahead and put it on the web (about 5 min) for everyone to have it available.  It isn’t a lot of work and doesn’t “cost” but a few minutes extra.  I hope it is useful to some people out there.

Here’s another wordle that I did just today.  I’ll try to do this from our RSS or ATOM feed every few months or so.  It would be interesting to see how things change over time.

Today, I came across this image.  It is from a visualization contest sponsored by New Scientist (I think).  It shows the Bible with a bar graph (below the horizon?) for the number of words in each chapter.  The arcs on top represent the links between chapters (wonder how they did that?  Theme?  Word?).

As I mentioned in our podcast for September 28, 2008, here is a link to Don Francisco’s website.