Archive for September, 2004
What if…
Juan Cole imagines what America would look like if we were suffering what the Iraqis are suffering through:
What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were […]
0 for 5,000
Until it was reversed by a federal judge, a recent court case in Detroit was
the only terrorist conviction obtained from the Justice Department’s detention of more than 5,000 foreign nationals in anti-terrorism sweeps since 9/11. So Ashcroft’s record is 0 for 5,000.
(Emphasis added. More info here, here, and here.)
NOTE: Ashcroft claims a higher batting average […]
Pepysdiary.com
In my article on blogging, I commented on the links between contemporary blogging and diary writing in the seventeenth century:
This is not unlike the situation in the 17th century, when political pamphlets and salacious broadsheets were the talk of French Salons and British coffee houses. The same period also saw the spread of new forms […]
graphophobia
logophobia: fear of wordsgraphophobia: Fear of writing or handwriting.
A Midwest Airlines flight from Milwaukee to San Francisco was canceled Sunday night after a passenger discovered Arabic-type handwriting inside an in-flight magazine.
The “Arabic-type” handwriting turned out to be Persian.
The director of Midwest’s corporate security knew someone who could read the writing and was told it was […]
Pronounciation
LanguageLog has a post about how the World Tennis Association’s (WTA) official pronunciation guide for Russian women tennis players is mostly incorrect. In commenting on the post LanguageHat comments:
The kicker is that “the WTA stands by its pronunciation guide” and suggests that “many players might adopt Americanized pronunciations when they speak with foreign reporters.” […]
Smoke
via chaotic intransient prose bursts, a Japanese campaign “to promote correct smoking behavior” (as opposed to trying to get people to quit smoking):
Now that smoking is banned everywhere indoors in NY City, I almost feel sorry for smokers. It has gotten to the point where I need to go inside for fresh air. I’m continually […]
江澤民
If true, this is big news!
Party sources said military chief Jiang Zemin [江澤民] was likely to give up his last post due to ill health, completing a leadership succession.
… Jiang, who had offered to resign on previous occasions in a tactic aimed at forcing allies to ask him to stay on, is likely to step […]
Labor Lobbyists
Mark Schmitt recalls being asked the question:
“Do any of you seriously believe that it is possible to have a real progressive movement in this country that doesn’t have a strong labor movement at the center of it?”
His memory was jogged after reading a David Broder column in which the seasoned Congressional reporter remembers when “the […]
Creolization
One of the most powerful forms of evidence that there is an innate “language gene” is the development of creole languages out of pidgins. Wikipedia explains it this way:
Pidgins are rudimentary languages improvised by non-native speakers; when pidgins creolize, however, they develop fully-formed and stable grammar structures, usually as a result of the pidgin being […]
Najaf Treat
The first day after 9-11 my Shashwati and I, worried by stories we had heard about a racist backlash, went to eat at our local Afghan kabob house to show our support. Knowing that most people would not know that the large picture of the King set them apart from the Taliban, the owners had […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
