Daily Archive: August 17, 2003

Someone sent this to me, knowing I love this kind of stuff, and I’ve decided to use it in next month’s AWC newsletter. If anyone tracks down the actual author, I’d be very grateful. 🙂 I take it you already know Of tough and bough and cough and dough Others may stumble, but not you, On hiccough, thorough, tough and through; Well done! And how you wish perhaps To learn of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird. And dead; it’s said like bed, not bead For goodness sake don’t call it “deed”. Watch out...

Things I’ve learned from reading Smithsonian magazine today: Every year the U.S. Federal government holds a Federal Duck Stamp contest for painters The Tour de France turned 100 this year Mummified pharaohs in ancient Egypt protected their toes with thimbles of gold Robert E. Lee had tiny feet that he loved his children to tickle (not sure I wanted to know this) Standing water in containers as small as a child’s beach bucket or plastic car is enough to provide a breeding ground for mosquitoes I have no desire, whatsoever, to ever visit Korea Got some helpful advice from thesidhe...

At a crayfish party tonight, the discussion somehow turned to whether hedgehogs eat meat or not, (turns out they do, even though they’re classed as insect-eaters), and after talking a little bit about what strange names they have both in English and Swedish, I started to make a joke that Sweden doesn’t have much in the way of fun animals. One woman started to get offended, saying, oh yeah, you have everything in America. And I thought, well, we DO. At least, I mean we have all the animals that Sweden has, and then some. I didn’t mean it in...