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January 20, 2005

Faking Fireworks?

I don't know if it is real or not, but this photo from an AOL news article on today's inaguration looks extremely fake.


The caption says:
Fireworks explode over the White House during the "Celebration of Freedom" festivities on Wednesday.


Not that I get all my major news from AOL (everyone knows i get all the news I need to know from here and here) but this picture caught my eye. Give me a picture of the White house and I could recreate that picture in about 5 minutes using Photoshop. The lighting is just completely off.

January 14, 2005

Looks like a born snow boarder to me!

Hello David James Graham! What are you ever going to do with TWO Aunt Julie's?


Presenting David James Graham

Grandma can't help herself she must hold her little Grandson, watch out Kim and Ted, she may never leave!

David, Proud Father, both sets of Grandparents and an Uncle

January 10, 2005

David Graham Arrives!

Happy Birthday David!! And Congratulations Kim and Ted!!!

It's official, I'm now an Aunt! My sister, Kim, gave birth to an adorable baby boy! I don't have pictures yet, but I hope to get some in the next day or two (a quick hurrah for electronic photography!) Here are the stats:

David ? Graham (middle name is yet to be decided)
7lbs 5oz
Born 12:08 CMT

I can't tell you how excited I am, I feel like I've just had about 50 espressos and then won an all expenses paid trip to Japan, I'm so jittery. So much for getting any more work done today!

Corrections! That's 15 ounces and MST not CMT, maybe I was a little too excited :-)

January 05, 2005

Another One Bites the Dust

Well ladies we've lost another one. Sniff, tear.

January 04, 2005

Altoids

Did you know that Altoids were created in the year 1790? I mean I knew they were old but for some reason seeing the actual year brings to mind all sorts of images of Men in wigs and Women in corsets eating the Curiously Strong Peppermints. I think of Mr. Darcy and Miss Elizabeth Bennet popping an Altoid right before that long awaited kiss at the end of Pride and Prejudice. Or King George III having one brought to him on a silver platter just as he's sending another shipload of Irish men off to Australia.

While I'm on the subject of Altoids, on the back of the tin in the Nutrition Facts they list a serving size of Altoids at 3 pieces. Who in the world eats three Altoids at once? Future archeaologists are going to find a tin of Altoids in Rowan Atkinson's pocket and think, "Wow, this must have been one tough guy".

By the way, I've decided to stop drinking coffee every morning at work.

January 03, 2005

I Tawt I Taw a Putty Tat

Ben sent me this article about an entire language based on Whistling.

The language evolved as a means of communicating across the island's jagged terrain thousands of years ago. La Gomera, a lump of volcanic rock west of Tenerife, is riven by barrancos (ravines) that make communication of any kind arduous. Silbo is thought to have arrived with settlers from the Atlas mountains of North Africa 2,500 years ago and it is far more complex than a few simple signals.


Could this have anything to do with Silbo's native island group being named after a whistling bird? Apparently not, according to this CNN article. Here is a page with more interesting info on Whistled languages (apparently there are several). These whistled languages, according to my understanding of the definition of a language, are not true languages. They do not seem to have their own vocabulary or grammer, instead each phoneme in the local spoken language is given a whistled equivalent, more like a code than a true language on its own. Silbo though seems to be an actual language with only 4 "vowels" and 4 "consonants". Funnily enough the title of this post only uses 4 vowels and 3 consonants, coincidence? I don't think so.

Here is an example of how Silbo is used:

"My brother was once hiking around Gomera with a friend. They ran out of drinking water and asked a local person for some. This person said she didn't have any (it was a very dry area!) but her neighbor up the mountain could help. "I'll let her know you're coming" she said, and whistled up the mountain. They walked up the mountain. My brother walked ahead and arrived first. When he got to the house, a stranger sitting there said: "Ah, there you are. The water's right around the corner there; but where is your friend?"


I'm a bit curious as to how one would transcribe this language. Could it be done with musical notes? or would an 8 letter alphabet be more apropriate? For learning purposes I bet a mixture of both would be useful.

-----*-------
#
-----------&-

--*----------

--------+----

_____

On a completely different note (pun sadly intended) I'm glad to see that the memory of He-Man has not completely died.

"Perhaps an Egyptian priest or king broke the curse of the skeletons, either by defeating the head skeleton in combat or by discovering the magic words needed to send their spirits back to Hell," Edmund-White said. "In any case, there is strong evidence that the Power of Greyskull played a significant role in the defeat of the skeleton people."



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