Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

False. I got lost so many times on my way to or from the temple when I lived in Provo, and you can always see the temple there.

People think I'm Russian (I don't know if I am. Dad was adopted. But I don't think I am.) I wonder if I don't smile enough...

Ha. I never made the connection. Clancy Brown, who played the cruel guard on The Shawshank Redemption, also provides the voice of Mr. Krabs.

SmurfBlueSnuggie wrote:People think I'm Russian (I don't know if I am. Dad was adopted. But I don't think I am.) I wonder if I don't smile enough...

I would think that smiling is something that depends on your personality and your environment, but not your DNA. Its a cultural adaptation. I think many Russians have a sense of tragedy and appreciate tragedy more than comedy, and this comes from their history and cultural traditions. But maybe this is just a stereortype.

Oh, I guess you are saying that perhaps you don't smile enough and therefore they think you are Russian. I don't think I make the association that way. If I see a person, unsmiling-like, I don't usually think "Hmm, I think he or she must be Russian."

Reminds me of the Gary Cooper movie, "Along Came Jones."

I was watching Bollywood songs on Youtube because I do, and I ended up researching one of the names in the songs. It turns out it's one of the names for one of the major gods, and it essentially translates as "cowherd." At first I didn't think that it's a very glamorous name, and I guess it's still not, but I remembered that Christ is called a shepherd, and really that's pretty similar. I wonder how many gods in how many traditions are described as caretakers for animals.

Wikipedia wrote:Cronkite trained himself to speak at a rate of 124 words per minute in his newscasts, so that viewers could clearly understand him.[83] In contrast, Americans average about 165 words per minute, and fast, difficult-to-understand talkers speak close to 200 words per minute.[84]

165 Words per minute for the average American, eh? I wonder what's the average for other nationalities/languages. Whenever I hear a stat, I usually want to know how that compares to related stats. I wonder what my words-per-minute rate is. I've never been told I speak particularly fast or slowly.

I speak very quickly.

There have been a lot of Language Log posts about speaking rate. Go to the end of this post for a few of them. I think you'd like this one and this one.

Oh, and here is a pretty short article on speech rates cross linguistically.

UffishThought wrote:I was watching Bollywood songs on Youtube because I do, and I ended up researching one of the names in the songs. It turns out it's one of the names for one of the major gods, and it essentially translates as "cowherd." At first I didn't think that it's a very glamorous name, and I guess it's still not, but I remembered that Christ is called a shepherd, and really that's pretty similar. I wonder how many gods in how many traditions are described as caretakers for animals.

That is interesting.

I've been listening to the top hits of two summers ago. Along with Gotye and Nate Ruess, there's Carly Rae Jepsen and her earworms. In a case of misheard lyrics, I was convinced it was "all the other boys try to change me." (It's "chase me.") My brother said this was a fascinating insight into my psyche. :P

I think my daughter's head is resting on my spine or something, because my back hurts so much right now.

Whenever someone at work talks about the git repository, it always makes me think of Red Dwarf.

Whistler wrote:I think my daughter's head is resting on my spine or something, because my back hurts so much right now.

I read this and was like, how do you not know for sure where her head is? But then I remembered that she is inside you.

A friend of mine - who, at the end of last semester, had said she wanted me to do her headshots - posted on FB that she was looking for someone to shoot her junior recital photos. I commented, mentioning that as I was still learning (and taking the possibility of being a photographer seriously) I would be shooting for free for the experience and possible portfolio shots. She went with someone else. The photos have been trickling onto FB for the past couple of days and they're fine, but I can see errors in all of them that are simple to fix either in the shoot or in post production. Like cropping the photo wrong. CROPPING THE PHOTO WRONG. Come on, guys, I knew about rule of thirds by grade school!

Just passed the 200 mark on Goodreads. B-)

Since my family reunion I've had an Australian folk song stuck in my head. It's not at all unpleasant, though it makes me tear up without any discernible reason.

TheBlackSheep wrote:Since my family reunion I've had an Australian folk song stuck in my head. It's not at all unpleasant, though it makes me tear up without any discernible reason.

Waltzing Matilda? (That's the only Australian folk song I know.)

You got it!

There were some LDS Church members who protested against the church's discriminatory practices. Two members, Douglas A. Wallace and Byron Merchant, were excommunicated by the LDS Church in 1976 and 1977 respectively, after criticizing the church's discriminatory practices. - "Black people and Mormonism"

Wish I had known this when I answered a question about this in the '13 reunion.

I think this should give us pause.