Category Archives: Total trivia

Who put the ‘sip’ in ‘insipid?’

Two confessions:

I’m hooked on Starbucks, although only moderately so. I hold my consumption of their House Blend to once a week, most of the time. (While in Memphis the week after Christmas, I’ll admit I drank it daily because an outlet was nearby; it nearly ruined my appreciation of the Ritazza joe they sell in the canteen down in the basement here at work, which normally I love.) It would be so much nicer if I gave my custom to some nice, local coffee house, but I leave that to my kids. They’re into that "Friends" kind of scene. To me, coffee’s not a social thing. I duck in, get it and go — unless I’m at a bookstore, in which case I quietly browse while drinking it. For this reason, I think it’s great that Starbucks is moving toward drive-thru. I can hardly wait for them to do that here — preferably on MY side of the river.
I find those little philosophical musings they print on the side of their cups, under the heading "The Way I See It," irritatingly trite and inane. Fortunately, they’re usually covered by the brown insulating sleeve. But I sometimes peel that off (I put a lot of sugar in it, which makes anything that spills over the side quite sticky) and read the musings anyway. I don’t know why. Morbid curiosity, perhaps. Or maybe sneering at these banal observations makes me feel better about drinking the coffee. I don’t know.

Here’s an example, dubbed "The Way I See It #61:"

Imagine we are all the same. Imagine we agree about politics, religion and morality. Imagine we like the same types of music, art, food and coffee. Imagine we all look alike. Sound boring? Differences need not divide us. Embrace diversity. Dignity is everyone’s human right.

This is the considered opinion of one Bill Brummel (Beau‘s great-great-great grandson, perhaps?), identified thusly: "Documentary filmmaker. His programs focus on human rights issues."

Is there anything wrong with anything he said? No. But does it provoke thought? No. In fact, by the time he got to the bumper-sticker sentiment, "Embrace diversity," my brain had nearly shut down, grande coffee notwithstanding. Talk about boring.

Variety is the spice of life, and so on. We all agree on that. But when I see something this mind-numbingly obvious represented as profundity worthy of mass reproduction, I find I want to argue with it. I want to say something like, "You know, it would be great if we’d go ahead and all agree on morality. If there were fewer people out there disagreeing with the consensus on morality, we’d have lot a less rape, murder and child molesting going on. There would still be some of those things, of course, because it is tragically human to do things we know is wrong. What’s really unbearably outrageous is people doing things that we all pretty much know are wrong and defending them as being OK, and condemning those who would censure them as narrow-minded. Such people’s battle cry is "WHOSE morality?,’ as though there were no absolutes, when there are. Seriously, can’t you think of ANYTHING that is just plain wrong, no matter who says it’s right? What do you have to say about that, Mr. ‘Imagine there’s no heaven?’ How about the crimes I mentioned above? Couldn’t you draw the line at child abuse? And if you could, wouldn’t you have to admit that there IS legitimacy to drawing lines, meaning that diversity of thought and attitudes is NOT always good? Huh?"

OK, so maybe that wouldn’t fit on the cup. But I think it would be more worth the ink.

Dang

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I remember some comedienne — apparently Rita Rudner — saying 15 or 20 years ago that she refused to buy anything technological until she got a written guarantee that nobody was going to invent anything else.

Those of us who had bought the White Album on vinyl, cassette and CD by that time could identify.

But I really thought I was safe on this one. I really thought DVDs were going to be a smart buy. I’m really into movies, and when I was a kid I thought that if ever I were as rich as Howard Hughes, I’d own copies of all my favorite films so I could watch them any time I wanted. And I’m not talking about "Ice Station Zebra" here.

But when VHS came out, I confined myself to taping the edited versions they showed on TV. I generally didn’t think buying the movies themselves on tape would be a wise investment, and I was right. That’s why you can pick up the few remaining on store shelves today for a song.

But DVDs were different. They were digital, and ones and zeroes would always be ones and zeroes. If a more advanced format came along, they should be easily transferable with little or no loss of quality, right? You couldn’t say that about the analog versions.

So I started collecting some of my favorites. As a father of five, I’ve never been one to spend much on toys for myself, but I wasn’t shy about making lists of what I liked and did not yet have for my family to consider for Christmas, my birthday and Father’s Day.

So gradually, I built up my my modest film library to where it fills, say, a couple of bookshelves. All primo stuff, too. And whenever possible, I went for the widescreen or letterbox format. Sure, Steve McQueen might look pretty small in "The Great Escape" on my old-fashioned, nearly-square 27-inch — but I was looking to the future.

In fact, I was at Best Buy just last night, exchanging one of the two copies of "Snatch" I got for Christmas for one of "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," and while I was there, I couldn’t resist checking out those 50-inch plasma babies and dreaming of the day when they drop down to my workadaddy price range.

Then, this morning, I got around to perusing the Week in Review section in Sunday’s NYT, and ran across this outrage.

For those of you too lazy to follow the link, it says:

DVD movies look just fine on TV. But if you’ve recently bought a
high-definition screen, you may be surprised to discover that current
DVD movies don’t actually play in high definition.

Maybe that’s not too bad. I mean, if my movies look as good as they do now, only wider and bigger, I could live with that and be satisfied. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that just in case you want to start buying DVDs that do play in high-def, you’ve got to make a bet that risks wasting even more money than the suckers who bought Beta in the early 80s.

That, in fact, is the point of the story — that two mutually exclusive formats have been drawn up for high-def DVDs, and it’s not just Sony on one side and the rest of the world on the other. Apple, Panasonic and 20th Century Fox are backing one pony, and Microsoft, Sanyo and Warner Brothers are putting their money on the other.

There is some good news, though: "Both types of players will be able to play conventional DVDs." Just not in high-definition. Well, I can live with that. But still.

Don’t be a FREAKIN’ IDIOT!

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While most of my readers seem to get more into Serious Issues of The Day, I try to leaven my offerings with a little fun. Sometimes that falls flat. But I’ll try once again, by sharing this item, which a colleague brought to my attention, knowing my fondness for the movie in question.

It seems that lawmakers in the state of Idaho — which doesn’t really spend a lot of time in the national limelight — passed a resolution showing their appreciation to the makers of "Napoleon Dynamite," the phenomenally successful little indie film, set in a tiny Idaho town, about a geeky high school student who finds acceptance by following his heart. At least, I think that’s what it was about. If you ask the makers, they’ll probably say, "It’s about what I FEEL like makin’ it about, what do you think? GOSH!"

I realize this is gibberish if you haven’t seen the film; it may be gibberish if you have seen it. Anyway, my favorite part of House Concurrent Resolution 29 is this:

WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote "Nay" on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN’ IDIOTS!"

Hence my headline.

The Idaho Falls Post Register‘s report on the legislative action ended with this:

The only "freakin idiots" in the Senate, by the way, were Davis and Assistant Majority Leader Joe Stegner of Lewiston.

It DOES mean something, Mr. Natural

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Totally off any subject at hand, and probably not worth reading, but I’m still reeling from having wasted two hours of my life, so why should you be spared…

In a post toward the end of last month, I made a completely superfluous reference to underground cartoonist Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural character. I won’t be making such casual links in the future, at least, not to that individual’s creations. Last night, my wife and I watched "Crumb," the David Lynch-produced biographical documentary. We had sort of enjoyed "American Splendor," in which Paul Giamatti managed to make Harvey Pekar‘s excruciatingly mundane existence interesting. Since that oddball flick was based in the "reality" comic book illustrated by Mr. Crumb, we thought (no, I thought; I take full responsibility) the 1994 film about him might also be engaging. We were (I was) wrong.

I came away from the film with one overwhelming impression:

Boy, that R. Crumb is one twisted (expletive).

Excuse my implied language, but I just had no idea. And yet I should have. It’s right there in his work, and if there’s ever been a better illustration of the truism that "by their fruits ye shall know them," it is the work of Mr. Crumb. (And yes, I read the part of that chapter that said "judge not," but read on.)

I never was a fan of Zap Comix or any of Mr. Crumb’s other work, but I was exposed to some of it at the time (although not much more beyond the ubiquitous "Keep on Truckin’" thing, and the Janis Joplin/Big Brother and the Holding Company album cover and such). And back then, I just thought this was a guy whose imagination was a little out there on the fringe of the kind of countercultural stuff that shocked our parents but that I tended to shrug at. I didn’t embrace it, but I wasn’t all that horrified, either. I was very young, and had not yet figured out that in one sense of the word (see sense 2), "discrimination" can be a healthy thing.

If the documentary got it right, the stuff in those comics was not just the product of a warped, hyperactive imagination with a penchant for mocking social mores. The problem was, he wasn’t entirely making this stuff up. According to those interviewed for the film, those twisted characters acting out abnormal, fetishistic sexual obsessions with a complete lack of regard for the human objects of their perversions actually were R. Crumb, in a real sense. As former wife after former girlfriend (one of them a professional pornographer) after family member, and Mr. Crumb himself, repeatedly asserts in the film, he not only thought like that, he acted like that. At one point, he acknowledges that he doesn’t think he has ever actually loved any woman. His relationships — or what we learn of them — tend to bear this out. As for some of the other twisted stuff — such as the drawings that pushed extreme racial stereotypes far beyond mere satire — the viewer is left without any satisfactory explanation.

All of that said (and here’s where I get to the "judge not" part), the film also made clear that the tree that is Robert Crumb was severely bent as a twig. No, it’s not an excuse, but it does appear to be part of the explanation. As Mr. Crumb and his brothers related, their father brutalized them (breaking the artist’s collarbone one Christmas) and their mother was an amphetamine addict who attacked the father (to the point that he wore makeup to work to cover where she had clawed his face). Both of the brothers were withdrawn and dysfunctional — neither was able to make his way in life in even the unconventional manner that their famous sibling has. One of them, who lived with their mother, never ventured forth into the world and spent his days in a psychiatric prescription drug fog, committed suicide a year after the filming.

There were also two sisters, but they declined to be a part of the film, indicating that at least someone in the family was capable of making good decisions.

It was profoundly depressing. And if I ever found anything in Mr. Crumb’s work even mildly amusing before, I won’t in the future, knowing where his "art" comes from.

Come to think of it, the fact that I watched the film all the way to the end makes me wonder a little about myself. And if you read all the way to the end of this, I sort of wonder about you, too.

Back to work.

Just in time for Halloween

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A black cat crossed my path this morning.

Which wasn’t fair at all. I mean, I had done everything right. Got up early, dropped off some shirts at the cleaners well before the cutoff for getting them back today, ran a couple of other quick errands while I was at it, and headed home for my morning run and then breakfast.

So I didn’t really need this omen. Not that it matters, of course. I have this happen every once in a while, and I’ve never noted any correlation between black cats and bad things happening. And I’m the neurotic sort who analyzes everything to death, including trivial apparent connections, so I would have noticed.

Still. It sort of ticked me off. The cat seemed to do it deliberately.

Anyway, I was wondering. I came across this cat suddenly, as I was rounding a bend coming into my neighborhood. It was sort of fluffy, and at first I thought it was a small dog. It was standing indecisively near the curb, and then started briskly out it front of me as I rolled toward it. It saw me, and stopped, just as I was braking. It looked for an instant as though it would turn back, but then looked away from me (in that arrogant way cats have) and proceeded on across.

What I was wondering was this … or rather, two things:

If the cat had turned back, would that have been a good omen? Or at least neutral?
If I hadn’t braked in time, and had run over it, would that have negated any theoretical bad luck? Or would it have been worse, like breaking a mirror or something? I know it would have made me feel worse. I think. (And no, Cindi, I wouldn’t have done it on purpose.)

As I said, I analyze everything to death. Anyway, any experts out there on this? Resources on the Web are confusing. This one says that in some countries, a black cat crossing your path is a good omen. Should I move to one of those countries?

I don’t know. I’m not planning on dressing up or anything, so this is as close as I get to getting in the spirit of the holiday. Have a happy and safe All Hallows’ Eve, and a blessed All Saints Day.

Harriet Miers was a BABE

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This might seem like a strange thing to bring up now that Harriet Miers’ nomination has been withdrawn. In fact, it would be an odd subject even if her nomination were still operative. But I’m not the one who first brought it up, and when I ran across something interesting while hunting for art for my last posting, it seemed to call for a mildly interesting footnote on the whole affair.

A lot of people (tacky people, mostly) said unkind things about Ms. Miers’ personal appearance — something that, it should go without saying, should have no bearing on her suitability for a seat on the court. Even one of our own letter writers (none of whom can be described as tacky, of course) remarked upon her makeup in a way that was not complimentary.

But that was nothing compared to the nasty, catty stuff out there in the Blogosphere. Such was to be expected, of course, from the incorrigible Wonkette, who said Ms. Miers reminded her of "an LPGA contestant," and then conducted a "poll" on the subject of her readers, who said she reminded them of, among others, Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne.

Plenty of others joined in, as you can see by the links from this posting.

But allow me to have the last word. I discovered this morning that Harriet Miers was a babe. At Miersbabe_3 least, she was once upon a time (in 1963, when she was in high school, to be exact). Beauty may fade as bitter experience does its worst upon us, but at least this former Supreme Court nominee can say (if she ever wants to) that she was once better looking than any of those making fun of her.

Not that it matters, of course. I just thought it was interesting.

Thank Blank

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Has anyone noticed, and been bothered (or at least perplexed) by the message on the electronic sign at the state fairgrounds the last few days?

(Safety consideration: This is best studied while stuck at the Rosewood red light when heading south on Assembly.)

The message is as follows:

First, the entire sign is filled with the word "Thank"

Then the word dissolves into a picture of the upper part of a clown’s face, and as you watch (waiting for the next word), the clown gives you an animated wink with his right eye.

That is followed by the words, "For a wonderful"

and the message ends with the words, "2005 State Fair"

So, to put it all together, the message is:

Thank (winking clown) for a wonderful 2005 State Fair.

What is that supposed to mean? Did someone forget the word "you," or is the first word supposed to be "Thanks?" If so, whoever made the error has had all week to fix it. I have to wonder whether there’s something I’m not getting about the message. Is the winking clown a reference to Conklin Shows, which used to run the midway (it has been merged into North American Midway Entertainment, the new vendor)? I believe its logo is, or was, a stylized clown face. Would the State Fair folks put up a sign facing the public to thank the (former) private provider in this manner? Seems unlikely. Is the fact that the winking clown is winking at you, the passerby, meant to imply the word "you?" If so, that is one really cryptic use of body language.

Can anyone decode this? As one who went to the fair, I’m assuming this is a message aimed at me, but I’m just not getting it.

Missed opportunity

Feliz Nueve de Octubre

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Happy John Lennon’s birthday, all you fans out there! May you be a whole lot happier than he was, in spite of all his advantages.

And no, I’m not the kind of guy who goes around with totally pointless Beatles trivia in his head. Lennon Well, actually, I am the kind of guy who goes around with totally pointless Beatles trivia in his head, but not to the extent of remembering their birthdays. That’s like something chicks would do, man, like remembering their fave foods (John: corn flakes) or something. And as I age, I find I can’t perfectly remember all of the words to all of their songs any more, so there’s a good chance that’s been crowded out by more important stuff. Not a certainty, but a chance.

No, I remember that the ninth of October is John Lennon’s birthday because Nueve de Octubre is also Guayaquil Independence Day. Now, you might not find that credible — who goes around remembering anything beyond the Fourth of July and maybe Bastille Day, right? But I lived in Ecuador back when I was in the fifth and sixth grades, and not only was Nueve de Octubre the name of the main drag in Guayaquil, but we got a whole week off from school for it. We got a Scroogesque day-and-a-half for Christmas, but a week for the day that Guayaquil tried to secede from the rest of the country. Lest you think that means Guayaquil is more nationalistic than Catholic, I should probably point out that since we were south of the equator, the school year was backwards, and Christmas fell just days before summer began. There was little point in taking off a lot of time at the end of December when we were going to be off from early January until April. Besides, the week-long celebration also included the Día de la Raza, which we think of as Columbus Day.

And OK, I also remember that John Lennon was born during the Blitz, as German bombers were attacking Liverpool in 1940. That’s a pretty cool factoid, I always thought. But I don’t know his fave color. Or I didn’t until I looked it up (green).

Fight or flee? Neither, actually, old boy.

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Imagine this in Andy Rooney’s voice, only with an edge…

Didja ever have one of those days when you were utterly convinced that those experts out there are right, that evolution has not prepared us in any way for modern life — especially of the white-collar variety? A day when you reach the realization that Ron Livingston‘s character did in "Office Space" — that Man was not meant to sit in cubicles (or offices) doing TPS reports?

I mean, our bodies — and particularly our central nervous systems — were just not made for responding to stress by smiling and being being all civilized and diplomatic and constructive and filling out the proper forms. We’re hard-wired to fight or flee, and all the rules nowadays say we can’t do either.

Anyway, while most days I love my job and can honestly say that I wouldn’t trade it for any other (except maybe directing movies, and I don’t think that’s realistic at this point), there are days — and I’m not saying this is one of them, nor am I saying it isn’t — when I wish I were something like a soldier, or a boxer. Days when instead of saying, "Yes, sir, well, I’m sorry you feel that way about that column/editorial/blog item," you want, on an atavistic level, to just go out and take out the objective (or at least blow something up), or kick some butt.

Of course, neither of those options is any more realistic than my chances of directing. The Army wouldn’t take me even when I was young and relatively fit. As for boxing — well, I took up kickboxing several years ago, when I was 47, and in my very first (and last) sparring match, my opponent broke four of my ribs in the first round. I still went the full three rounds, even after he dropped me to one knee by hitting me again in the very spot where my ribs were broken. That one hurt. (I am proud of having gone the distance, even though it was only three rounds. Conversely, my wife sees it as final proof, as though she needed any more, that I am an idiot. Which isn’t my fault, since, speaking of evolution, my brain still hasn’t fully developed.) Basically, this guy didn’t get the idea of sparring; he seemed to think it was a real fight. Combine that with my inability to think defensively (as in, keeping my stupid elbows down), and I was in trouble.

So really, I’m pretty lucky that I do have a weenie job such as editorial page editor. Especially since someone just came in while I was writing this and gave me some good news that made this day a lot better. So I guess I’ll wait until another time to strip off my clothes and go running through the savanna — or the would-be Green Diamond project — looking to kill a wildebeest with a rock. For now, blogging is about as close as I’ll get to that.

Out amongst ’em

Biloxi blues

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I suppose this is extreme pedantry on my part, and definitely goes under the heading of trivial concerns in the face of the devastation wrought by Katrina (the one with the storm surge, not to be confused with the one with the "Waves"), but something has been bugging me the last couple of days: The persistent mispronunciation of "Biloxi."

I wasn’t going to say anything, but NPR just woke me up with yet another such offense. Rather than explain it myself, I’ll refer you to this blog entry. I’m assuming the "Gray Ghost" knows whereof he speaks — or maybe I just think so because this is the way I have always said it. If someone knows differently, and has authoritative proof that the way we usually hear it via broadcast media is correct, I’m all ears.

Oh, and by the way, it’s not that I frequent the site where I found that item. It appears to be a bit out there on the libertarian fringe for my tastes. I found the above-referenced posting by Googling "pronounce Biloxi." I was unable to find anything authoritative-looking — such as, say, a ruling from the Biloxi Chamber of Commerce or something like that. About the only sites that even brought up the subject were the sort that concern themselves with "Biscuits, grits and such." That’s the vaunted Information Superhighway for you. When I run into brick walls such as this one, I wonder why Al Gore bothered to invent the blamed thing to begin with.

You might want to leave this sort of thing to Dylan

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Sure, Mick, "You call yourself a Christian; I call you a hypocrite" COULD be made to rhyme with "Shut the door, you silly twit," but you’d really have to WORK at it, and I’m afraid the strain would show.

I’m just not sensing another "Honky-Tonk Women" here. You and Keith put your heads together (if Keith can find his) and get back to me…

Languages are cool

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So I’m registering to get an outpatient lab test done at Lexington Medical Center (you don’t want to know — suffice it to say that a really annoying abdominal virus has slowed down my blogging, and everything else, for several days), and there’s this sign on the desk. Under the headline, "Interpretation Service Available" are the following two sentences in English:

Point to your language.

An interpreter will be called.

Under that is the same message translated into 20 other languages — Arabic, Armenian, Cantonese, French, German, Hindi, Hmong, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Laotian, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese.

At first, I’m really impressed that the Lexington Medical folks can whistle up such a veritable United Nations from among their staff at a moment’s notice (I mean, it’s a good hospital and all, but whoa), but then I realize this is a phone service — Language Line Services, to be precise. Basically, it seems you call them up and get them to tell you what the patient is saying.

Anyway, as the lady is asking me insurance questions, I’m getting lost in the fascination of contemplating the myriad ways all these foreign chaps have of relaying one simple message. I don’t just mean that the words are different; I’m talking about the fact that they’re almost never a literal translation, thanks to the magic of idiom — and culture, and (in at least one case, I suspect) politics.

Note that I’m not claiming to be conversant in all these language — even the western European ones. But you pretty much know that there’s something really different going on when the first of the above English sentences is rendered this way in French:

Montrez-nous quelle langue vous parlez.

… and this way in Spanish:

Señale su idioma.

…and this way in German:

Zeigen Sie auf Ihre Sprache.

The plot thickens when you contemplate the differences between the two Iberian languages. Compare the Spanish above with the Portuguese:

Aponte seu idioma.

Note that the Portuguese is the closest of all those listed thus far that is almost exactly a literal interpretation of the English, "Point to your language." Except that apparently "aponte" conveys a meaning that renders the preposition "to" superfluous.

Whereas if you take the Spanish literally, it says "Signal your language." (And says it politely, using "su" instead of the intimate "tu.") Apparently, señalar (to signal) is one way you can say "point to" in Spanish. But I also find that the more literal apuntar can mean the same thing. So why wasn’t the literal version used? Does it have a slightly more accurate connotation? Does it depend upon which of the many nations the Spanish-speaker happens to hail from? Do more people who call into the service come from countries or regions that prefer señalar, or does this sign merely reflect the whim of the particular interpreter who helped put this sign together?

And while I’m on a questioning jag, why in the world are Spanish and Portuguese so different? Oh, I understand the history and all (or I did 30 years ago when I had it in college), but why do they not even sound like related languages? Spanish is the only one of these 20 languages I have ever been fluent in (the result of living in Ecuador as a kid), but when I hear Portuguese it might as well be a Slavic tongue, for all I understand. I can (sort of) follow Italian much more easily — it sounds like Spanish, to my ear. Maybe the two years of high school Latin have something to do with tying them together for me. Which brings up another question: Why is it that Spanish seems a purer derivative of Latin than Italian? Is it the echo of empire? Is it for the same reason that some forms from Elizabethan English that died long ago in Britain can be heard today in Appalachia?

(If you’re wondering what the registration lady is doing all this time while I’m grooving on the sign, I kept her pretty busy with the fact that I didn’t have my insurance card with me. So she tries to call me up by name, and gets my Dad instead. I ask her for a scratch sheet of paper, my eye on the translations. Then I suggest she look up my daughter, who had had my card when she came in for a test last week, which was why it wasn’t in my wallet. Eventually, she straightens it all out. When I’m on my way out from my test, she catches me back at the sign still copying translations, and asks if I’d like her to make me a copy of the whole thing. "Um, yes, I would. Uh, thank you very much. See, I work for the newspaper, and …" oh give up, there’s no way to explain this behavior. She was amazingly sweet to indulge my eccentricity so.)

Enough of this. Probably no one will read it. Well, one last point — the "political" difference. It struck me that only the French interpretation had to include both the masculine and feminine article with one of those awkward "slash" compromises that the politically correct resort to: Nous vous fournirons un/une interprète. (At least, I assume those are the masculine and feminine articles. I’m sort of reaching the limit of my linguistic abilities here. As near as I can tell, that means, "I think I can reach it from here with my four iron.")

Meanwhile, either the Italian (Un interprete sarà chiamato), the German (Wir rufen einen Dolmetscher an) and the Spanish (Se llamara a un intérprete) all assume that the masculine is inclusive, the way we once did in English (I know they do that in Spanish), or they don’t demand a distinction in the articles in these instances. Can it be that the French are really more like us than they would choose to let on?

Oh, well. None of this is why I went to the hospital. But wait — let me close with my personal favorite linguistic anomaly. In Tagalog, the message goes like this:

Pakituro po ninyo ang inyong wika.

Magpapatawag kami ng interpreter.

What a coincidence, huh? That’s almost as cool as people in Latin America playing béisbol…

By the way, I fully expect to be chastised as a Philistine for my ignorance by people who actually understand these languages. I’m even looking forward to it, because I’ll learn some things I don’t yet know about them. All I really know for sure is that languages are cool — to an unschooled geek like me, anyway.

bradwarthen.com

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