flickering pictures

How brilliant is this interactive little site?
Well, it can tell you that Washington, D.C.’s lone legislator used a meager 35,679 words in 2008 — enough for a long-ish novella. In comparison, California’s 57 representatives spoke exactly 1,346,968 words — equivalent to 33 regular full-length novels, or about two and a half times the length […]

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Each day, delivered fresh to my inbox at work, I and a million other people get a word-of-the-day from Anu Garg himself, the Indian émigré to Seattle whose Wordsmith site created a bit of a sensation back in 2003, when these things were still novel.
Today’s word was too neat not to share — particularly in […]

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They totally should have given it to him.

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The quote of the day comes from Republican National Committee chairman Mike Duncan, who’s leading the GOP’s charge into social media:

“We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today.”

Is it just me, or does the phrase “do it in the Facebook” sound just ever […]

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Germany’s world-renowned Max Planck Institutes, whose science and technology researchers are among the world’s finest, accidentally printed an ad for a Chinese brothel on the cover of its latest journal.
The Independent reports:

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 […]

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Language is a clumsy inadequate tool, which is all the more reason to celebrate those who wield it well. In The Workings of the Subtle Heart — the “second greatest book ever written” according to Kurt Vonnegut — William Widmer riffs on a Japanese word that seems to have no English equivalent.

I am told […]

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