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 [...]
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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 [...]
big shiny jelly bean
The first Google hit for “big shiny jelly bean“ is the official Millennium Park Cloud Gate page. Pretty neat. One of these days I’ll make it over there to see it. My one trip to Chicago consisted of eight hours in a conference room and several more hours at O’Hare. I went and saw another of [...]
figures of speech, part one of ∞
Metonymy is when one thing is referred to as another related thing. An example would be referring to the U.S. federal government as the Capitol. (Tangentially related: Synecdoche.) Prosopopoeia is the personification of inanimate things or non-present people. For example, the flames of the fire danced in the wind. The two should not be confused.* [...]
2009 travels
Places I visited (and number of visits, if n > 1) in 2009: Seattle, Wash. Boston, Mass. (2) New York, N.Y. (2) El Portal, Ca. Yosemite National Park, Ca. San Francisco, Ca. Paris, France (2) Alghero, Italy (2) Bosa, Italy Oristano, Italy Cagliari, Italy Nuoro, Italy Hannover, Germany Berlin, Germany Hamburg, Germany Freehold, N.J. Princeton, [...]