You've come a long way, babu!

Gay Sex Decriminalised in India

Incidentally, when I first viewed the article, the "Ads by Google" section at the bottom listed "The Timothy Plan", "Gay Weddings in Vermont", and "Denver Defense Law", in that order. The Timothy Plan, if you're not familiar with it, describes itself as "a family of mutual funds offering individuals, like yourself, a biblical choice when it comes to investing. If you are concerned with the moral issues (abortion, pörnography[*], anti-family entertainment, non-married lifestyles, alcohol, tobacco and gambling) that are destroying children and families you have come to the right place." But before I could get a screen capture (damn evangelical investor site crashing my flamboyantly homosexual browser!), it'd been replaced with "Canada Same Sex Marriage".


[*] Can I just burble for a minute about how much I love the heävÿ metäl ümlaüt in "pörnography"? I imagine it's there to spoof family-friendly filters, since the use appears consistent throughout the site.

WotD: pencil

Per request of caprinus.

1. der Bleistift
2. het potlood
3. el lápiz
4. el llapis
5. le crayon mine
6. y pensil
7. an peann luaidhe, an pionsail
8. ołówek
9. 연필 (鉛筆)
10. 鉛筆 qiānbǐ

Notes: caprinus requested this because he was curious how many words in other languages shared with Polish a derivation from the word for "lead". As it turns out, roughly half: Chinese 鉛筆 is an exact equivalent of German Bleistift, i.e. a compound of "lead" and "writing instrument". The Korean is a borrowing of the Chinese (though don't ask me to explain the incongruity in initial consonants) and the earlier Dutch term, loodstift, was equivalent to the German. The current name literally translates as "pot lead". The first of the two Irish terms is literally "pen of lead", but--as with most things--the borrowing from English is probably more common in the contemporary language.

On the other hand, you have Catalan llapis and Spanish lápiz, which both ultimately derive from Latin lapis "stone" via Italian (though the preferred term nowadays is matita). Similarly, French crayon actually derives from craie "chalk". Of course, English pencil and its derivatives (e.g. Welsh pensil) infamously descends from a diminutive of Latin penis.

RUMTOPF!

Finally, our Rumtopf is off and running. I know it seems ridiculously late, but I have really only one criterion for what fruit goes in and that is that it be good. By "good" I mean of course sweet, ripe, and fresh, and the supermarket strawberries from Mexico or wherever simply weren't cutting it. Thank Ceres for the farmers' market downtown. Last week monshu was finally back to full days at work and managed to bring home some Michigan cherries (most of which ended up in clafoutis) and strawberries that passed the bar.

So when I came home today I found two trays of washed and tried fruit. First I cut the tops off the strawberries, tossed them in, and covered them with their weight in sugar. That ended up being all the granulated sugar we had in the house, so I had to go out for another four-pound bag in order to coat the cherries. It took about four cups of rum (equal amounts 80 proof and 151 in order to average down to above the magic number 108) to cover it all.

Actually, there's more to the delay than simply waiting for local fruit to come into season. Now that the blue-hot passions it ignited have cooled, our full Rumtopf saga can finally be spun. Click if you dare for...

The Untold Story

( With pictures! )