I said this on a mailing list on Lambda:

I actually like it when cashiers and other strangers wish me a Merry Xmas. I am always happy to reply with “actually I’m Jewish, but Happy Hanukkah!” I would probably do this even if I weren’t Jewish, just because it’s fun.

And msmellow responded:

I like Etoile’s attitude. She appreciates when people are trying to be nice, even when their approach is misguided. Some of you could learn a lesson here.

Somebody else didn’t get it, but Mellow really has summed up my holiday-season worldview. I know these people mean well in wishing me Merry Xmas. (I wonder if they say it to people who are obviously from cultures that don’t celebrate Xmas?) I just like pointing out that not everybody is Christian, and not everybody celebrates Xmas, but that I appreciate their well wishes. I’ve never had a bad response to this. And yes, I do happen to celebrate Xmas, but Judaism is part of my cultural heritage and that’s important to me.

I have just ordered three tickets to see the Moscow Cats Theatre! These are real domestic cats that do tricks - I think we shall take pictures and show them to our cats and demand similar performances! (By the way, if you look at that site, click the non-animated version…unless you like nausea.) It’s at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and we are going to the next-to-last show - Thursday, December 29th, at 3:30pm. We have seats that are front row center - Row A, Section 2, Seats 109-110! It was rather expensive but I’m looking forward to the show.

The Speech Accent Archive is an absolutely fascinating collection from George Mason University. They have gathered 440 audio samples of persons from around the world reading a passage in English. Here is the passage:

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

You can listen to that read by everyone from an Afrikaans speaker from Pretoria to a Zulu speaker from Zimbabwe! Most languages have more than one sample; the English list is the longest with 113 different recordings. Most samples also include an IPA transcription.

I did notice a conspicuous omission from this project, though: deaf individuals reading the passage. I sent an e-mail to the comments address suggesting that they obtain samples from deaf Americans, including some who are native speakers of ASL and others whose native language is English. (They could theoretically expand beyond the United States with this, but to do so would risk duplicating the entire globe under that section, so keeping it to the U.S. seems reasonable.)

Added: He wrote back right away!

yes. an excellent idea. if you can sent us some good recordings, we
would be happy to post them.

So now I just need to find deaf people who are willing to record themselves reading that passage. Sure, that’s easy…anybody want to volunteer?

There was a thread in the CourtTV.com Karla Homolka section called Question for D.V survivors. The vitriol in that thread really shocked me. This topic might be kind of sensitive for some people, so I’m going to hide part of this post.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Sorry Everybody site is quite popular. There’s been a response site created recently: Apologies Accepted. My favorite so far from that site is here, but I find this one rather incomprehensible.

When I was growing up, my mother taught me that the phrase mentally retarded was inappropriate and developmentally delayed was preferable. To this day I still use the latter phrase when I’m around her, because I know it’s her preference - even though, in many cases, the person is not delayed…they’re not going to develop additional cognitive skills, ever. Today, however, I learned that the federal government’s official term is mental retardation, and that’s what is used by equal employment offices. I found this out when someone wanted to use the phrase intelligence-challenged, which to me sounds more offensive than any of the other terms! (He may have meant intellectually challenged, but that’s not much better.)

Being politically correct isn’t always a good thing. Many people use the phrase hearing-impaired, but most of the people who say that are hearing people. In fact, the term is considered offensive within the Deaf community, whose members don’t view themselves as impaired! There are all kinds of examples of PC-ness taken to the extreme. Shouldn’t we just say what we mean? “Short” is not a derisive term, it means “having little height; not tall.” You don’t have to say “height-challenged” for somebody who is short, you can call them short. But perhaps PC terminology is just an effort to make everybody feel special. “It’s okay to be height-challenged, because now you can overcome that challenge!” Excuse me? How, exactly, is a short adult supposed to grow taller? Isn’t that what’s implied by the phrase “height-challenged?”

I’ve been hearing the GMC slogan “It’s not more than you need, it’s just more than you’re used to.” for a long time now. Last night it finally struck me what it meant.

No, it really is more than I need. I don’t need a vehicle that’s 6½ feet wide, more than six feet tall, over eighteen feet long, weighs almost three tons and only gets 15 miles to the gallon. I don’t need to tow anything that weighs four tons behind my vehicle (a 19-foot sailboat is only half a ton), I don’t need Autoride because I’m not driving through uncharted mountain ranges, and I don’t need StabiliTrak because I can steer my own damn car, thank you. Many people who drive SUVs use them in suburban settings, for carting groceries around. A regular car will happily hold a parent and a couple of kids for going to soccer practice, even if the kids have to bring their own soccer ball.

So yeah, it is more than I need. Fuck you, GMC.

Ogg Vorbis Phone Post (100k, 0m25s)

Right now I am behind a black Toyota Camry with Virginia plates that has a bumper sticker taped to the center of the inside rear window that actually says “Boycott France”, and has a French flag with a “NO” symbol through it, and it says - beneath “Boycott France” it says, “The spin stops here.”

How stupid can you be?!

Transcribed by my mother

Added: It turns out the Camry’s turn signals were broken, how sad! I happened to follow it through much of town, through six turns, and not once did its turn signals work! Most of the roads were back roads, but during rush hour they are pretty well-populated because most people are trying to avoid the main drag through town. I’m sure that with so many other cars around, the driver would have used turn signals if they worked…I hope they get fixed real soon!

A lot of the body modification pages I’ve been finding through stumbles are mostly ads, but Body Art from the Australian Museum is a really high-quality site. It’s well-designed and attractive, and includes features on body painting, piercing, scarification, tattoos, and shaping (corsetry, footbinding, headbinding, and cosmetic surgery). Each section includes a basic history, pictures, and quotes from practitioners, and none of the pictures are particularly explicit or shocking. It’s definitely a good overview of body modification in general.

There was an accident along my normal route to work this morning, so I took a different way that put me on Route 1 from south of the beltway. It was really interesting to see all the retail, lodging, and restaurants along the huge strip there. There were restaurants of every imaginable cuisine (I saw one with Caribbean food, and now I want callaloo!), including a Krispy Kreme complete with the “Hot Doughnuts Now” sign and a drive-through! There was plenty to gawk at, but I was driving, so I resolved to look up US Route 1 when I got to work. I’ve been finding a lot of interesting things about America’s historic roads, including Route40.net which has a lot of pictures from along the entire National Road. I grew up near the Ellicott City portion of Route 40, which is included in the Maryland scrapbook on that site. Route 66 probably gets the most attention of all of America’s famous historic roads, but there’s an interesting site called Route50.com as well - I live fairly close to Route 50 in Virginia. (Note: Route 66 is not the same thing as Interstate 66, which I take at least once a day to get just about anywhere.) As for Route 1, Wired magazine sent a correspondent on a road trip along the entire length last year. I was able to find out a little more about it, but there’s not a whole lot of information on its history in the mid-Atlantic area. I did come across the interesting site BeyondDC, though, which was educational as well.