Women, grammar, and exercise!

What women were wearing when they were sexually attacked... debunking one myth about rape.  And myths about birth control.

English, the language of oopses.  And grammarphobia.

We're drinking the wrong kind of milk?  And look!  We've made a superbug to eat the supercorn!

What do you still do now that you did when you were poor?

Scars (nsfw)

No wonder I feel like California didn't have a winter!  We didn't!  And:

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. 

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

Fukushima fallout.

Elizabeth Warren and what she has done for you.

US Government to Deregulate Meat Industry

Scary scientist is scary.

Underwater archaeology.

Why this runner runs.

Word play

Adjust the number of words you want compared, and look at the graph. I think my favorite word embranglement wins the prize!

Say you,

Say me....

Foreign jokes.

Foreign profanity.

And then there are those to whom English is a second language....

Bristol Palin went on official Palin family blog “The Facebook” today to attack Keith Olbermann and rouse the pity of the conservative faithful, just as her mother would. Touching. Instead of using the standard teenager speak she and her sister usually employ on Facebook, however, she translated her message to Olbermann with some interesting selections from a thesaurus.

Blog sprinkles

The Brits are being droned?

Two official safety inquiries took place into the military use of drones over southern England after near-collisions with helicopters, the Guardian can reveal.

The investigations are the first of their kind involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are increasingly being flown in British civilian airspace after extensive use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obviously the drone operators were distracted by eating cheetos or something. Gotta get real gamers to operate the things, they would know how to avoid collisions!

How many accents can you do?



The GOP will not.. no they won't! ... WON'T eat their evil nasty green ugly vegetables. So there!

Was Christine O'Donnell going from A to Z with her religious quest to see which one would offer the best way to make money?

Two hope blogs for the price of one!!

We could have predicted that all the gay bashing that has gone on would lead to youthful gays killing themselves in despair. Hate speech leads to hate crimes.

And GOPs will claim when caught that they were only joking!

From one English as a second language person to another

Start with the simple words first...

Nine words that don't mean what you think

Faintly NSFW ... depends on your boss.

English majors are the new terrorists

They will explode your world with a well-placed comma, strafe your comfort zone with devastating puns, and nail you with an expletive.

Phyllis Schlafly, please attempt to have carnal knowledge with your most intimate parts in a manner known to be physically challenging. Chet Scoville of The Vanity Press explains.

Forsooth!

Update: I bet Schlafly would think Rumsfeld would balance out the evil liberalness of universities. Note the last comment. How much do you bet he's one of these dirty effing tolerant liberal hippie types?

STANFORD, California (CNN) -- Students and professors at Stanford University are protesting Donald Rumsfeld's appointment to a campus think tank, saying the former defense secretary does not uphold the "ethical values" of the school.

Shortly after Rumsfeld's appointment was announced in September, professor Pamela Lee began an online petition from faculty members opposed to bringing him to the Hoover Institution.

Since then, the petition has gained more than 3,500 signatures, including nearly 300 faculty members from such diverse disciplines as law, computer science, electrical engineering and drama.

"We view the appointment as fundamentally incompatible with the ethical values of truthfulness, tolerance, disinterested inquiry, respect for national and international laws, and care for the opinions, property and lives of others to which Stanford is inalienably committed," the petition reads.

[snip]

"Many of us believe that Donald Rumsfeld, in his role as secretary of defense, has behaved in ways that are dishonorable, disgraceful and always disingenuous," said Dr. Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology.

"Rumsfeld authorized a list of interrogation methods that violated the Geneva Convention and the Convention against Torture used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay ... and Iraq's Abu Ghraib Prison," said Zimbardo, whose most recent book, "The Lucifer Effect," finds that given the right "situational" influences, anyone can be made to participate in violent and depraved acts.

Lee said her position does not discourage debate or public exchange of ideas.

"Let me stress that the petition objects to Rumsfeld's appointment as Distinguished Visiting Fellow, an appointment we find without merit," Lee said. "In fact, there is nothing in the language of the petition that says Mr. Rumsfeld is forbidden to air his views at Stanford or is not welcome for a public lecture or open forum."

But not everyone disagrees with the appointment.

"Personally I disagree with his politics," said Brett Hammon, a political science major. "But at the same time, I'm not sure I think it would be prudent for the university to refuse hiring him just because most students disagree with his politics. I know I would hate it if I went to school in Texas and the university refused to hire a prominent liberal politician just because most of the student body was conservative."

Could this happen in reverse?

You fall over a Segway perhaps and you lose the ability to speak your native language?

A CZECH speedway driver knocked unconscious in a crash stunned ambulance drivers when he woke up speaking perfect English.

18-year-old Matej Kus was out cold for 45 minutes after the crash, but when he woke up he conversed fluidly in English with paramedics, even speaking in an English accent.

The teenager had just begun to study the language and his skills were described by friends and team-mates as “basic at best”.

[snip]

"Matej didn't have a clue who or where he was when he came round. He didn't even know he was Czech.

"It was unbelievable to hear him talk in unbroken English."

Unfortunately, the speedway driver's new found skills didn’t last and he remembers nothing of the accident or the following two days. He is now keen pursue studies in English.

He told the Daily Mail, through an interpreter: "It's unbelievable that I was speaking English like that, especially without an accent.

"Hopefully I can pick English up over the winter for the start of next season so I'll be able to speak it without someone having to hit me over the head first.

"There must be plenty of the English language in my subconscious so hopefully I'll be able to pick it up quickly next time."

I mean... It would explain a lot....

Update 9/22: It happened again, although this time it was just the accent:

A 10-year-old boy has woken up with a posh English accent after undergoing life-saving brain surgery.

William McCartney-Moore's usual northern England accent was replaced with a much more refined tones complete with elongated vowels after he had an operation to remove fluid on his brain.

William, who is from York, needed the surgery after falling ill with a rare strain of meningitis last March.

"He survived the operation and the most amazing thing is that he came out of surgery with a completely different accent,'' his mother Ruth McCartney-Moore told the York Press newspaper.

"He went in with a York accent and he came out all posh.

"He no longer had short 'a' and 'u' vowel sounds. They were all long.''

Mrs McCartney-Moore said doctors initially thought her son was going to die.

He lost everything, she said, including his ability to read, write and recognise different objects.

But William began to recover after the operation and was out of hospital in about a month.

"We went on a family holiday to Northumberland and he was playing on the beach and he said,
'Look, I've made a sand castle' but really stretched the vowels, which made him sound really posh,'' Mrs McCartney-Moore said.