photographic redunancy
My roommates and I hosted a party on Saturday night. The attendance was zero. Being the irrepressible scamps that we are, we partied by ourselves and took pictures anyway. Here’s a poorly Photoshopped one of me regaling me with a rather ribald anecdote that cannot be repeated here due to my intractable sense of public [...]
etymological redundancy
From last month’s Washington Post: “Metro Transit Police say they have a new unit working to deter terrorists from targeting the transit system.” Deter is from the Latin de (from) + terrere (to frighten), which is also the origin of terrorist. They used two words in a row that share a common derivation of a [...]
figures of speech, part two of ∞
Eunoia is doubly interesting–first, as a curiosity in being the shortest English language word to contain all five vowels, and second, as a figure of speech. From the Greek for “well mind,” it refers to the concept of benevolent goodwill. I read today’s op-ed in the Times about Microsoft, and it made me think that Bill [...]
white supremacitibank
Starting tomorrow, Citibank will charge me a $7.50/month service fee to keep my money if I don’t maintain a $1,500 average balance on my checking account. (I imagine that the other national banks will follow suit soon.) I plan on closing my account and switching to my free, local credit union. But in case I don’t [...]
later, panda
Tai Shan is being deported to China on February 4. Rather than getting misty-eyed about his impending departure, I say, good riddance. That’s right–I’m anti-panda. The Supreme Court recently affirmed personal freedom of speech rights for corporations. I’d like to think that if there actually was a prosopopoetic corporation, he would sound like the stiff [...]
ball
Okay, I’m sure Deadspin already has a post about this with hundreds of (single word) comments, but this post-game interview is amazing.
beer, coffee, and trains
So it’s the end of the week, and I’m incredibly scatterbrained at the moment for some reason. I’m at my parents’ for the weekend–it’s my dad’s birthday today. I took the 3:50 pm Brunswick Line MARC train up to Frederick from Union Station this afternoon. I picked the drunk train. (Fox 5 did a story [...]
2010 travels (tentative)
Places I want to visit (and current, lowest published roundtrip airfare from Washington, D.C., according to Bing travel) in 2010: Pittsburgh, Penn. – $120 Portland, Or. – $274 Montreal, Canada – $308 Austin, Texas – $212 London, U.K. – $596 Jerusalem, Israel – $1135 New Delhi, India – $971 Bangkok, Thailand – $1496 Tokyo, Japan [...]