1. Penn dancing?? And Marlee Matlin. Huh. People keep asking how she'll dance if she can't hear the music..... Fair enough question, I suppose, but just use your brain for longer than ten seconds and you'll probably figure it out.

2. Iceland wins. Again.

3. Ikea is bigoted, apparently.

4. Grammar Nazis strike again.

1. Holy shit. You could put a leash on that thing and take it for a walk.

Also, a purple, pointy-nosed frog.

2. In a test of the American Dream, Adam Shepard started life from scratch with the clothes on his back and twenty-five dollars. Ten months later, he had an apartment, a car, and a small savings.

Well yeah. He wasn't in an overpriced urban area. And he's male. And young.

I'd like to see the same thing done with varying ages/races/genders.

3. Interesting.

4. Financial Woes Force Church To Sell Private Jet

Also, this:

Sullivan says the church's problems could be a combination of the recession and the recent bad publicity about churches preaching the "Prosperity Gospel."

The prosperity churches are based on the idea that success in business or personal life is evidence of God's love.

So if you're poor or unpopular, it's because God hates you.

5. Oh noes!

1. Hopefully they've just let the kid pick which high school he wants to attend. I can sympathize with the father somewhat, but if the kid's been raised to think for himself, going to a Catholic high school isn't likely to change his mind (permanently, at least). If the kid can get a better quality education at the Catholic school, by all means send him there. Let him make up his own mind on the religion bit.

2. Edenics!

A summary, for those too impatient to follow the link above:

Edenics has overwhelming new evidence that human language was intelligently designed, at Eden, and purposely diversified, at Babel.

Some gems from the FAQ:

Did grunting ape-men evolve a new bone by random mutation so they could whisper sweet nothings? Only speaking, modern humans have the delicate bone floating in our throats called the hyoid bone. The oldest hyoid bone enabling speech that was ever found was NOT dug up in Africa but in the Carmel Caves near Haifa, Israel. If someone wants to speculate about the oldest human language NOT being Semitic, they had better come up with an older hyoid bone from somewhere else.

Because, of course, spoken language is the only valid human form of language. Other modalities, like, say, visual-manual, don't count. Of course.

Most of our data come from dictionaries where the words are spelled in English letters.

Which works perfectly, because orthography always accurately portrays phonology. Always.

Two years later we adopted an eight-year girl from Hong Kong. Her only English word was “McDonald’s”. I began to see how many of her “mistakes” in English were hard-wired. At the table she’d say “pass the life” instead of “pass the knife.” I tied this in with the Mandarin vs. Cantonese dialect switch, with one saying “Nay ho ma?” (how are you?) and the other saying “Lay ho ma?” (how are you?). I learned that the N-L letter shift, unknown in the West, was deep in the brain. And so must be the letter shift shifts that turn Edenic HahR (hill, mountain ) into English HILL or Russian ghora.

Or maybe, just maybe, this 8-year-old girl's phonemic inventory (including the interchangeability of /l/ & /n/) was influenced and solidified by the language she heard during early childhood? Like everyone else?

From the Edenics primer:

Why do peoples with divergent grammars, the Maya, the Chinese, the Persians and the Greco-Romans, have variations of the Bible's Tower of Babel account or The Flood?

Because they're archetypal stories rooted in basic human psychology and common human experience?

more intelligent opponents correctly cite that many coincidences result from there being so few different sounds in the human mouth. True, one may say there only seven basic letters, since all vowels, lip letters (plosives b,f, p, v, w), gutturals (hard c, g, h, j, k, q, x), tooth letters (dentals d, t), liquids (l,r), nasals (m,n) The trouble with this mathematical objection to my findings (say, linking SKUNK to TSaKHaN, stinker) is that there are a billion billion things/meanings in the universe and I am not linking SKUNK to a word that means giraffe, cupboard, them or heavy.

But has anyone tested to see if it's just as easy to link modern English "skunk" with proto-Semitic "giraffe", "cupboard", etc.?

From yet another Edenics page:

I mostly listen to phonemes, the sound of two root letters combined. Anything longer than two letters is a combination of meaning elements, just as anything including H2O has been added to water.

Either this guy thinks he's simplifying linguistic terminology for the benefit of the layperson (in which case, he's simplifying incorrectly), or he just plain doesn't understand phonemes and morphemes. Did he really just take a linguistics course or two in grad school? How does that qualify him to be an expert in historical/comparative linguistics? Or phonology?

Bet, like Pey, is a graphic of the human lips, or what linguists call a bilabial plosive. What is the only difference between the similar looking Bet and Pay? The Pay indicates muscular stress on the upper lip -- precisely that which differentiates a P sound from a B.

Well, kind of. That and voicing, which I'd imagine is the more salient difference to most linguists as well as laypersons.

The difference between D and T is the solid engagement of the top, indicated by the Daled's T-like axis, and the slight gap and quicker, lighter engagement of the teeth ridge by the (ironically) D-like Tet.

Again, with the ignoring of the voicing.

Okay. Tired of that now. Moving on.

3. I'm way behind on this, and I have no idea what the status currently is on this, but....

Affirming the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation's founding and subsequent history and expressing support for designation of the first week in May as `American Religious History Week' for the appreciation of and education on America's history of religious faith.

Okay. I guess that's fine. Appreciating the historical impact of religion in America seems reasonable. As long as we look at the good with the bad....

Whereas religious faith was not only important in official American life during the periods of discovery, exploration, colonization, and growth but has also been acknowledged and incorporated into all 3 branches of American Federal government from their very beginning

Now wait a minute....

Whereas in 1853 the United States Senate declared that the Founding Fathers `had no fear or jealousy of religion itself, nor did they wish to see us an irreligious people ... they did not intend to spread over all the public authorities and the whole public action of the nation the dead and revolting spectacle of atheistical apathy'

Dead and revolting? Heh.

Resolved, That the United States House of Representatives----

(2) recognizes that the religious foundations of faith on which America was built are critical underpinnings of our Nation's most valuable institutions and form the inseparable foundation for America's representative processes, legal systems, and societal structures

Because good moral governmental practice is only possible via religion. Because morality is only possible via religion. Exactly.

(3) rejects, in the strongest possible terms, any effort to remove, obscure, or purposely omit such history from our Nation's public buildings and educational resources

Educational resources, sure. Public buildings, no. Church-state separation trumps nostalgia when it comes to physical symbols of government, I think. Moderation and common sense prevail, though. Don't go knocking down an entire building because it has a Latin quotation referencing God somewhere. But do remove that Ten Commandments monument from the courthouse front lawn, please.

Much better and more credible responses to the Resolution can be found here, here, and here.

4. Today's headline in News of the Pointless:

Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back

At least I'm somewhat ahead of the curve?

5. Anthropology to the rescue!

...anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

Take that.