AdamSmith

He cleared your cash? Happens to me all the time! P.S. Firefox is the answer to all troubles. Thank you too much!

Excerpt from a new Boston Globe article: ... •Singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge, who talked with Warren Saturday night when both spoke at a convention of Muslims, wrote an open letter in the Huffington Post, explaining why she, as a lesbian, was giving Warren a chance -- she even acknowledged that, "he invited me to his church, I invited him to my home to meet my wife and kids." An excerpt from Etheridge: "Brothers and sisters the choice is ours now. We have the world's attention. We have the capability to create change, awesome change in this world, but before we change minds we must change hearts. Sure, there are plenty of hateful people who will always hold on to their bigotry like a child to a blanket. But there are also good people out there, Christian and otherwise that are beginning to listen. They don't hate us, they fear change. Maybe in our anger, as we consider marches and boycotts, perhaps we can consider stretching out our hands. Maybe instead of marching on his church, we can show up en mass and volunteer for one of the many organizations affiliated with his church that work for HIV/AIDS causes all around the world. Maybe if they get to know us, they won't fear us. I know, call me a dreamer, but I feel a new era is upon us." • Blogger Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic and longtime advocate for same-sex marriage, compared Warren's views favorably with those of Pope Benedict XVI, writing, "At least Warren appears open to dialogue, rather than recoiling in fear and loathing. In that he is somewhat more Christian than this Pope." Sullivan had initially been hostile to the Warren selection, but declared more recently: "I sense an understandable but, the more I think about it, misjudged response on the part of my fellow gays and lesbians. In our hurt, we may be pushing away from a real opportunity to engage and win hearts and minds...If I cannot pray with Rick Warren, I realize, then I am not worthy of being called a Christian. And if I cannot engage him, then I am not worthy of being called a writer. And if we cannot work with Obama to bridge these divides, none of us will be worthy of the great moral cause that this civil rights movement truly is." ... Whole thing here: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles_...warren_lov.html

Thank you! OK, Safari cache cleared. And if trouble persists, very helpful to know that FireFox can be used as Liquid-Plumr. Or as "Ram-Out," a provocatively named drain opener based on, no kidding, sulfuric acid! An old apartment superintendent recommended it to me, then passed away, then I got in loads of trouble for eating holes in the drains. Of course in latter days I learned to pay if I wanted to eat a hole. Little Sally took a drink But she shall drink no more, For what she thought was H2O Was H2SO4!

For the past 2 or 3 weeks, the MER servers seem to have been particularly temperamental. Roughly half the time I try to access the site, it hangs up and eventually my browser displays a "server not available" notice. Thoughts?

Boston is not quite that bad. This morning I was panicked to click on cnn.com weather and see the current temp as 0 degrees, until I noticed my display was set to Celsius. Sometimes, to make it sound better to myself, I think of the local temps in degrees Kelvin. To rub it in, The Nuisance & Disturber (http://www.newsobserver.com/) reports today's high in Raleigh will be 55 degrees.

Conceivably Stu intended that not as a dig at me, but a general lament about life.

Thus the transfer of wallet to the front pocket! Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, wad to wad.

Wait til your 50th approaches. Amazing how quickly things can start falling off.

I get it at my local adult-video/sex-toy chain store. I've seen it in Manhattan adult-vid shops also.

Don't you just hate when this happens... Chinese 'classical poem' was brothel ad Science journal mistakenly uses flyer for Macau brothel to illustrate report on China A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel. Chinese characters look dramatic and beautiful, and have a powerful visual impact, but make sure you get the meaning of the characters straight before jumping right in. There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany's top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text of a handbill for a Macau strip club on the front page of its latest journal. Editors had hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special issue, focusing on China, of the MaxPlanckForschung journal, but instead of poetry they ran a text effectively proclaiming "Hot Housewives in action!" on the front of the third-quarter edition. Their "enchanting and coquettish performance" was highly recommended. The use of traditional Chinese characters and references to "the northern mainland" seem to indicate the text comes from Hong Kong or Macau, and it promises burlesque acts by pretty-as-jade housewives with hot bodies for the daytime visitor. The Max Planck Institute was quick to acknowledge its error explaining that it had consulted a German sinologist prior to publication of the text. "To our sincere regret ... it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning, which are not immediately accessible to a non-native speaker," the institute said in an apology. "By publishing this text we did in no way intend to cause any offence or embarrassment to our Chinese readers. " But publication of the journal caused some anger among touchier internet users in China who felt the institute had done it on purpose to insult China, or that it was disrespectful to use Chinse as a decoration. But generally, the faux-pas sparked much amusement among Chinese readers. On anti-cnn.com, a foreigner-baiting website set up after a commentator on the US broadcaster made anti-Chinese comments following the crackdown in Tibet in March, the reaction was mostly "evil fun". One wrote, "Next time, please find a smart Chinese graduate to check your translation", and another said they should try writing "I am illiterate". The journal has since been updated online and its cover now carries the title of a book by the Swiss Jesuit, Johannes Schreck (1576–1630). The Jesuit text in question was "Illustrated Explanations of Strange Devices". Chinese is a tonal language, which means words sounding the same can often have very different meanings depending on how they are spoken. There are tales of drunken teenagers walking out of tattoo parlours with characters reading, "This is one ugly foreigner" or "A fool and his money are easily parted". Another web-user wrote: "I recently met a German girl with a Chinese tattoo on her neck which in Chinese means 'prostitute'. I laughed so loud, I could hardly breathe." http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertai...ad-1058031.html

Time is the enemy, all right. I have not quite reached the point of asking my doc for Cialis, but I have tried several over-the-counter pills and capsules from the adult vid stores. The red capsule named StiffNights is the most effective one I've found so far... http://www.stiffnights.com/ ...and thus far it has not given me a headache or heart attack!

Sacrilege. But fairly funny. Inhale beforehand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU4TQ1NTo50

On one hand, this is disheartening. On the other, it may hold some only-Nixon-could-go-to-China potential. If moves like this cement Obama's cred with the center-right majority, then his authority and ability to push things through will be all the greater when he takes steps such as rescinding don't-ask-don't-tell, which he has vowed to do and in which I believe him. I was no Obama fan to begin with; I was rabidly for Hillary. But I have been won over by Obama's ability to blend idealism with steely pragmatism -- and his rather remarkable ability to do so without, I think, having his realism shade off into cynicism. Time will tell if that view of him is accurate, and if he can keep it up once the realities of governing descend on him in full. I hope so.

Keanu barada nikto! Or rather, in this case, not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_barada_nikto

Bit of Brit drollery occasioned partly by the new, evidently dreadful 'Day the Earth Stood Still' remake... How to write the perfect disaster movie As Roland Emmerich prepares his latest epic and The Day the Earth Stood Still invades cinemas, we offer a 10-point plan for the ultimate disaster film Roland Emmerich, the king of the disaster movie, is back. Not content with sending a tidal wave crashing over Manhattan in The Day After Tomorrow or allowing aliens to destroy the White House in Independence Day, Emmerich, in his new film 2012, is gearing up to unleash volcanic eruptions, huge cracks in the surface of the earth, enormous typhoons – and more floods. If you can't wait for that, today sees the release of a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which alien spheres suddenly turn up all over the world – including one in Central Park – heralding an attack on the planet that only Keanu Reeves can prevent. Any of this sound at all familiar? Allow me to refresh your memory with this 10-point guide to the perfect disaster movie. 1. Pick a good disaster A lot of the best disasters – asteroids, aliens, earthquakes, tsunamis – have already been taken, sometimes twice, as in the embarrassing simultaneous releases of Armageddon/Deep Impact and Volcano/Dante's Peak. So you'll have to be a bit creative. Pick something unusual: what if gravity started going sideways instead of straight down, say? Your opening scene should show life seemingly going on as normal – think of Will Smith going out to get a paper at the start of Independence Day. Your lead character should get up one morning, rumpling his hair and yawning, and head for the bathroom to clean his teeth. He turns on the tap, oblivious to the first signs of disaster about to strike. Gradually the stream of water begins to veer towards him. The soapdish suddenly tips off the shelf and crashes to the floor, and he starts to lose his balance. He falls flat against the bathroom wall, water streaming over him from the tap. Shaking his head, he pulls a small bottle of whiskey out of his dressing gown pocket and looks at it disapprovingly. 2. You need a scientist A scientist or professor of some kind – middle-aged, handsome – is crucial to a good disaster movie. We should first see him hard at work in the lab or out on a mission (perhaps briefly wearing glasses), as he starts to get the first inkling of what's going wrong. Perhaps some animals in a zoo have been spooked by unusual weather, or a car has been blown down a motorway upside down for no apparent reason. Baffled, he takes his findings to an older mentor, who adds a fact of his own: enormous wasps three times their usual size have been appearing all over the Arctic, say. It's the missing piece of the puzzle. "You've got to take this to the president," the mentor tells him. 3. You need a hero This is not the scientist. The hero has to be a bit more down to earth, a bit of a rough diamond. Flawed but noble – like Bruce Willis in Armageddon. A guilt-ridden cat burglar with an adopted, terminally ill orphan son would be perfect. 4. Send your scientist to the White House A quick meeting with the president of the United States seems to be the first stop for all worried scientists in disaster movies. But don't make it too easy. A sceptical and slightly sinister vice-president or secretary of state should stop him at the door to the Oval Office. He doesn't want to listen to any of this mumbo-jumbo about sideways gravity. "But this might be our only chance to save the world!" the scientist tells him. "Listen, Professor, you go back to your theories," sneers the veep, "and leave saving the world to us." 5. Mayhem across the globe Now it's time for you to up the stakes and sacrifice a couple of foreign cities – or even a minor American one like Chicago (you're keeping New York and LA back for later, of course). London or Rome would be perfect. Shanghai or Tokyo are great, too. In his lab, the scientist turns on the TV news (preferably a branded channel affiliated with the film studio) to see foreign buildings crashing down into the streets. Reporters jabber to camera and slide helplessly down the middle of the road. "It's started," murmurs the scientist. 6. Mayhem in New York As the scientist tries to alert an unbelieving public, things should really get serious: it's time to hit New York. In a flurry of special effects, the city should spectacularly fall over to one side as the effects of the disaster take hold, with various New York archetypes such as hip students and phlegmatic waitresses thrown across the streets while yellow cabs flip over and roll into the sides of skyscrapers and water towers fly off roofs and burst against fire escapes. It is crucial at this point to destroy an iconic building in a breathtaking scene you can feature in the trailer. A lot of New York's most famous buildings have been used before, however – some more than once – but how about the Guggenheim museum? You could have it flip on to its side and roll all the way down Fifth Avenue like a wagon wheel. 7. Back to the White House All this is enough to convince the president that the scientist is right, so he calls him back for a top-secret briefing in the White House situation room attended by dozens of worried-looking army chiefs. The scientist explains what is happening with a mixture of junior-school astronomy and outrageous psuedo-science, using whatever items are to hand, perhaps a ping-pong ball to represent the earth and a basketball to represent the sun. At this point it's the scientist's role to set out the plot in full. "You're aware of gravity, right? If you drop something, it lands on the floor, instead of floating in the air. Like this." He drops an apple on the ground. "Now, this meteor that hit the sun was powerful enough to switch earth's gravity in a different direction. In England, in Tokyo, and now in New York City, gravity's stopped going downwards – and started going sideways." As the vice-president protests, the scientist continues: "As that meteor continues its journey into the heart of the sun, the whole of the earth will switch to horizontal gravity." 8. The scientist puts together his team In a cave underneath Mount Rushmore, the president should introduce the scientist to a crack team dedicated to fixing the problem – which should turn out to include his attractive ex-wife as well as a droll Englishman. The three of them should come up with a plan to stop the disaster – the more unrealistic the better. A good one in this case would be to have someone jump off the Empire State Building like a diving board in order to activate a nuclear weapon that would destroy the moon and thus reset earth's gravity; anything like that, really. Watching a cable news channel as they discuss who could carry out this dangerous mission, the team sees a report from the devastated New York, where the cat burglar is leaping across sideways skyscrapers to save an old grandmother's life. "By Jove," says the Englishman, "I think we've found our man!" The celebratory mood should be punctured by a brief phone call to the scientist from the head of the army with the upsetting news that "we lost Canada". 9. Last-minute setback By now more and more parts of the world should have succumbed to the threat, and, after recalculating his figures for some reason, the scientist should report that there is a much smaller window of time than he thought to stop the sideways gravity before it destroys the whole globe. But while building the nuclear weapon to destroy the moon, something goes wrong, killing the hapless Englishman and damaging the weapon so that whoever sets it off will die with it. This should cause a huge row, with the cat burglar refusing to go through with the plan. A sentimental speech from either the scientist or his ex-wife will be enough to convince him, however, and he manfully agrees to sacrifice himself. Just before he sets off for New York, his little orphan son taps him on the shoulder, and whispers: "Mommy would want you to do this, Dad." The cat burglar puts his hand on the boy's head, and says: "I know, son." 10. Set-piece ending All that remains now is to put the plan into action. The cat burglar clambers precariously along the Empire State Building, almost falling at least twice, and prepares for the dive of his life from the tip of the spire. The scientist and his ex-wife share a meaningful glance. A group of minor characters toast the end of civilisation with one last drink. Crowds gather in Times Square and other locations around the world to watch what's about to happen. In the Oval Office, a sombre president murmurs: "May God help us all." The cat burglar dives. The scene cuts to outer space as the moon is destroyed. The sun tilts back on its axis, and back on earth gravity swings gradually back to its normal direction. Buildings right themselves and stand up straight again. Foreigners in turbans or Eskimo furs cheer and hug in far-off locations. The scientist reaches out for the hand of his ex-wife. And the little orphan boy runs up to his cat burglar dad for a dramatic hug, the Empire State Building back to normal behind them. He didn't die after all! http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/20...t-disaster-film

Being my own boss, the best I could come up with was to be at least as unproductive as on any other day.

Dire measures for dire straits!

A modest proposal for distracting the senses... Shortly before sacrificing oneself to the family scene, take a judicious dose of mescaline or psilocybin, as taste dictates, then absorb this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLq8h66oGt0

When you started out saying you visit family to relieve stress, I couldn't believe it. Then I read the rest of your post. I resemble your remarks! But at long last, I can accept as iron law that family has zero real interest in what's new with me. So to divert them from current gossip, I try to get them talking about the family's past. From their parents' generation, to as far back as they can remember of their parents' and grandparents' stories. This stuff is usually immensely interesting, and not something that will be around forever. Of course I am from Thomas Wolfe country, where reminiscing is still a religion. Maybe there are places & families where the past is not what it used to be.

Pitch-perfect! You have correctly transposed the key from Wolfe to Tennessee Williams. Any such thing would include, as the villain's wife, Anna Magnani rampant.

Great at massage: Forget about getting near my pipe, much less my hole.

If that headline didn't deter readers from clicking into this thread, this photo surely won't offend... Incoming Obama administration director of speechwriting Jon Favreau (L) and a friend pose with a cardboard cutout of incoming Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a party. (Obtained by The Washington Post) By Al Kamen Question No. 58 in the transition team vetting document for the Obama White House asks that applicants: "Please provide the URL address of any websites that feature you in either a personal or professional capacity (e.g. Facebook, My Space, etc.)" Question No. 63 asks that applicants "please provide any other information ... that could ... be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect." For a while there this afternoon, President-elect Barack Obama's immensely talented chief speechwriter, 27-year-old Jon Favreau, might have been pondering how to address that question. That's when some interesting photos of a recent party he attended -- including one where he's dancing with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of secretary of state-designate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and another where he's placed his hand on the cardboard former first lady's chest while a friend is offering her lips a beer -- popped up on Facebook for about two hours. The photos were quickly taken down -- along with every other photo Favreau had of himself on the popular social networking site, save for one profile headshot. Asked about the photos, Favreau, who was recently appointed director of speechwriting for the White House, declined comment. A transition official said that Favreau had "reached out to Senator Clinton to offer an apology." Favreau is not the first campaign aide whose online presence has proved awkward. Last March, John McCain aide Soren Dayton forwarded an anti-Obama YouTube video to his private Twitter feed linking Obama with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, leading to his suspension from the campaign. And in 2007, two bloggers hired by former North Carolina senator John Edwards stepped down after blog posts they had written before he hired them became a subject of controversy. Favreau's case seems unlikely to be so dire; Clinton senior adviser Philippe Reines cast the photos as evidence of increased bonhomie between the formerly rival camps. "Senator Clinton is pleased to learn of Jon's obvious interest in the State Department, and is currently reviewing his application," he said in an e-mail. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail...e_question.html

What AdamSmith wants for Christmas, apart from more twinks... A way with words: Lexical wizard Henry Hitchings on the crazy history of our language 'Margarine' comes from the Persian word for pearl, Edmund Spenser coined 'blatant' and many of our naval terms come from the Dutch. By Suzi Feay It's rather nerve-racking, interviewing an acknowledged master of the English language. I tell Henry Hitchings that I feel as though I'll have to take extra care with my choice of words. "Don't," he says briskly, as he ushers me into his book-lined 13th-floor Bermondsey flat. Fortunately, his attitude to language is anything but stuffy, snobbish or prescriptive. His latest book, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, has just won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for writers under 35 (past winners include VS Naipaul, Angela Carter, David Hare and AL Kennedy). A strong shortlist included The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, which won this year's Man Booker prize, Ross Raisin's acclaimed novel, God's Own Country, and Adam Fould's book-length narrative poem, The Broken Word. However, Henry Sutton, this year's chair of judges, says that it was the only book to win "universal praise" from the judging panel. "It reminds us of just how important etymology is to understanding the history of a fractured world," he comments. Hitchings' focus is not just on the rarefied and literary, however. "I'm not saying I hang around on street corners talking to young people," he announces, "but I have noticed a lot of Romany words around these days. You hear a lot of young people saying they're going round to somebody's drum. Things like that I find quite intriguing. I don't know what the exact significance is, but I like the idea that your flat is a drum and that you roll around in it like a pea." London spreads out under the windows of Hitchings' drum; from St Paul's to the London Eye and Battersea power station. He points out a long brick wall, near the foot of his block, which is supposedly the last visible remnant of the Marshalsea prison. Given that Mr Dorrit's travails continue on BBC1, it seems appropriate to ask what Hitchings thinks of Dickens' use of language. "I think he's a wonderful writer at the level of the sentence," he enthuses, confessing that he finds the longer novels difficult to get through. "But at the micro level he is incredibly rewarding." It's the micro level that concerns Hitchings the most. Of contemporary authors, he singles out Edward St Aubyn and Alan Hollinghurst. "They're probably the two English novelists where I just feel that every single page of their books has an insight which is not only really trenchant, but which is expressed much better than one could ever express it oneself." In non-fiction he admires Robert Macfarlane, whose book The Wild Places was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize last year (when I was the chair of judges). "He's a very close friend of mine," confesses Hitchings, "but I particularly like the way he writes about things that are really quite banal, like stones, or the sky. I remember him once referring in conversation to a 'gin and tonic sky'. I'm not sure if I could spell out to you why that's so good, but I love it." So where did this fascination with words come from? Hitchings can remember his mother, a gifted linguist, teaching him the Greek alphabet in the bath when he was "probably about four". His father was a barrister, "someone who's quite particular about language being used accurately and with clarity. My parents didn't put me under pressure academically, but they were very keen to stimulate me. I'm an only child, and from quite an early age they treated me as an adult and had adult conversations with me." He picked up an interest in language "by osmosis". "Etymology was something that came from that; that idea that a large chunk of the English language comes from other places. Often in English we have several words for the same thing that come from different sources, each of which has a different set of associations. So you've got dead, which is a word of Germanic origin; you've got deceased, which is a word of Norman French origin, and you've got defunct, from Latin. You would use them in very different circumstances." You can see exactly the same pattern in shit, ordure and excrement. A stint reading English at Oxford led to a PhD on that ultimate words man, Samuel Johnson, at University College London. This fed directly into his first book, Dr Johnson's Dictionary, written for the dictionary's 250th anniversary in 2005. The Secret Life of Words is filled with fascinating nuggets. Everyone knows about Anglo-Saxon being overwritten with Norman French after the Conquest, but who knew about the superior Dutch seamanship that, in the 16th century, brought us skipper, boom, deck, sloop, reef and hull, not to mention landlubber and keelhaul? We all know about the Raj giving us pyjama and bungalow (which simply means "belonging to Bengal"), but what about shampoo, "the imperative (champo) of the Hindi champna, a verb that conveys the idea of kneading and pressing the body to releave fatigue and stimulate the circulation" . So that modish head massage your salon insists on inflicting isn't so newfangled after all. "The life of words is very interesting," he says. "I thought, almost everyone is interested in words, and yet we take them for granted. What I mean by 'secret'," he elaborates, "is that beneath the public use of words, there are all these submerged stories to do with where things come from, which are often very unexpected, and which may even cause one to rethink how one uses certain words." However, he cautions: "I don't think one should use words in the strict etymological sense, otherwise candidates would have to be dressed in white! You don't go around adhering to the root meaning like that, but I think a sensitivity to where words come from makes one more selective about which words one uses." Despair at the erosion of the English language is not a new phenomenon, as he demonstrates time and again in the book. "Purism is a bit of a nonsense because so much of the language one uses was borrowed once, and it always seems to me that when people argue about usage, they're really arguing about something bigger: standards, morals. People talk about the 'decline of the English language' – and it's not in decline. People have been exercised about these issues for as long as we have written records. You only have to look at the antipathy there was in Shakespeare's era to words coming in from the Spanish, Italian, French and Latin. The hostility to French words is almost a given in the English language!" Borrowings are not necessarily straightforward like-for-like switches either. He points out that, though we get bra from the French brassière, "in fact the French use soutien-gorge, and a brassière is a life-jacket." Shakespeare was another Bermondsey/ Borough resident. He gets a rather brief mention in The Secret Life of Words, and I ask why. Surely he's the great word-mint of the English language? "No. No," Hitchings demurs. "It's very often exaggerated. There's no doubt that a lot of Shakespearean phrases have entered the common currency of speech, as have phrases from the King James Bible, and Shakespeare does coin words, but I think he was probably more of a populariser of things that were already there. It's not a particularly useful way to think about Shakespeare, or about English, to say he is the architect of modern English." There's a distinction to be drawn, he points out, between your active vocabulary (the words you actually use) and your passive vocabulary (the words you recognise). "'Shakespeare had a vocabulary of 50,000 words' seems to me to be a fatuous statement, and it doesn't translate into 'Shakespeare is responsible for 50,000 words', or anything like that. The thing about being a playwright is, you're displaying more of your vocabulary in order to be novel. The other thing is, our impression of the past has, until comparatively recently, been based on written records, so you might say there's been an excessive emphasis on Shakespeare and other dramatists and poets as a source for what Elizabethan and Jacobean English was like. There must have been all kinds of things going on orally, but we have no sense of that." Though his first book was a biography of Dr Johnson's dictionary, he acknowledges we are in a new age as far as lexicography is concerned. "Recently I have perused Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang and the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang. Impressive books in their way – the Green book is amazing – but by the time it's set down in hard covers, slang is already out of date. When you hear something and don't know what it means, you don't look it up in a book, you look it up on the internet: Urban Dictionary, places like that." He foresees a two-tiered system, with a place for printed works and vetting by committee, but ultimately, he says: "The internet is the future of lexicography." His next book, due in 2011, is a history of the controversies of English usage. "A lot of the time, people say 'this word is a bastard word', or 'I'm really upset about split infinitives', but these arguments are not new." (I suspect that, as he's also the author of an entertaining bluffer's guide called How to Really Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Hitchings takes a relaxed view on split infinitives himself.) It's amazing where a conversation about words can lead you. In an hour we've covered the literal Chinese translation of "monosodium glutamate"; the fact that you order a schooner of beer in Sydney but a pot when in Melbourne; the Japanese practice bukkake; and Google's failed attempt to stop people using its name as a verb. ("They wanted people to say 'conduct a Google search'; but 'googling yourself' would have to be 'conducting a Google search for your own name'. And it really does feel like a verb.") Hitchings is still fizzing with ideas and enthusiasms when the interview ends. I leave him brooding over the Italian for football. "The fact that they call football calcio is extraordinary to me. The root is the same as calcium. It's thoroughly curious..." The Secret Life of Words, By Henry Hitchings (John Murray £16.99) '...We may well enjoy knowing that botulism comes from a Latin word for sausage, that muscle is related to mouse (a bunched muscle being a bit like a quivering mouse), or that mortgage literally means death grip; in each case the link is unexpected and droll. An album is, in the strict etymological sense, something white, like a blank writing tablet, and to prevaricate means to plough crookedly.' http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertai...ge-1038141.html

Their web-site hosting services are like that, too. If you need customer support, forget about it. And the latest sign of their sinking ship: Their web hosting services used to keep backup snapshots of your web site at regular points in time, dating back for at least a year. But recently, with no notice to customers, they deleted all the snapshots older than one month. Caught me by the balls on one site I help to maintain. Methinks they will now have a hard time getting anything like the valuation that Microsoft first offered for the business.