12 of the 50 states that make up the United States of America have names beginning with a vowel – see here. I don’t believe that there is a higher proportion of countries in the world, or countries in a continent, or states/regions in a country, or towns/cities in a country, that have names beginning with vowels. On the other hand, all continents have names beginning with vowels (if you ignore the North and South of the Americas, or the submerged continent of Zealandia. Does anyone else find that striking?
28 November 2020
22 September 2018
Tanggam
From here:
“Interestingly, two minor roads, Lorong Tanggam and Lorong Samak, located on the opposite side of the main road of Jalan Kayu were given Tamil names, where Tanggam (Thanggam) means gold in Tamil.”
Tanggam means mortise in Indonesian, part of a woodwork joint – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortise_and_tenon.
14 July 2018
Divided We Fall
The use of the term “colonised” in the following video (at 2:42 to 2:55) struck me as very odd:
14 September 2014
British, Great Britain
In answer to the question “Is it ever correct to call someone “Great British”?”
From Wikipedia:
“Brittany (French: Bretagne [bʁə.taɲ] ( listen); Breton: Breizh, pronounced [brɛjs] or [brɛχ];[1] Gallo: Bertaèyn, pronounced [bəʁ.taɛɲ]) is a cultural region in the north-west of France. Covering the western part of Armorica, as it was known during the period of Roman occupation, Brittany subsequently became an independent kingdom and then a duchy before being united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain (as opposed to Great Britain). It is bordered by the English Channel to the north, the Celtic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the Bay of Biscay to the south. Its land area is 34,023 km² (13,136 sq mi).”
13 June 2014
Chicken Jokes
My 4 and a half year old daughter, Yasha, found this joke very funny:
Why did the chicken sit on its eggs?
Because it didn’t have a chair.
8 March 2014
WhatsApp!
I have a large group (more than 300 players) that plays football. I messaged them on WhatsApp to see if we had enough for a game tomorrow night. WhatsApp deactivated my account and when I tried to re-activate the account, I was informed that the number is no longer allowed to be used with the service. I messaged the group to inform them of my new number and WhatsApp deactivated that as well, and won’t let me use that number any more either!
16 December 2010
9 December 2010
2 September 2010
Money Laundering
News of the World smashes multi-million pound cricket match-fixing scandal:
“In a meeting with our investigators puppet-master Majeed:
- BRAGGED that the scam is rife and future games against England this summer are already earmarked for cheating.
- CONFESSED his match-fixing round the world had netted customers MILLIONS.
- REVEALED how he oversees cheating by using no-balls, specifying how many runs will be scored or conceded in certain overs, with signals such as changing gloves to confirm the fix is on.
- ADMITTED he abuses his position as owner of non-league Croydon Athletic FC to launder his illicit gains.”
16 October 2009
Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize
Obama Should Have Turned It Down.
“He should turn it down”. That was my first reaction when my wife, watching the news break, shouted out to me that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel Committee must take the blame for this farce.
Several people pointed to an article by Robert Krebs in Foreign Policy magazine last July, in which he argued that the Nobel peace committee’s intentions are always partisan:
And for good reason: The Nobel Peace Prize’s aims are expressly political. The Nobel committee seeks to change the world through the prize’s very conferral, and, unlike its fellow prizes, the peace prize goes well beyond recognizing past accomplishments. As Francis Sejersted, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in the 1990s, once proudly admitted, “The prize … is not only for past achievement. … The committee also takes the possible positive effects of its choices into account [because] … Nobel wanted the prize to have political effects. Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.”
How true.
