h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

[PCT]

*Start of hols, and yet busy w*rking right now.*
*The Big C Domain updated to latest and best style, and permanent. Works with /all/ browsers. You know the URL.*
*Will reappear tomorrow when he has time...*

Cordial Greetings Baron Tonkster.

Does C mean digit or cell?

I am still Unch.

No smilie.

Does my last posting look weird to anyone else?!

Amy, I'm sorry to hear that your supe is such a stick-in-the-mud. Hope your weekend isn't so bad.

Prof, I'm off to see your new and improved site. Then I am going home. W*rk is almost done!

Unch, just out of curiousity, why aren't you changing your name back? I've got the researcher # written down so I recognize you, but I was just wondering...

Well, all. I'm off for home. Have wonderful weekends one and all.

G7

Well that makes several of us, Loony.

*helps herself to Lil's best red wine*

must press refresh before posting AND check the LEDs

Recently in New Jersey state regulations were introduced that require all elementary schools to teach all students a second language. It's being phased in over several years, but we should soon see multi-lingual New Jerseyians in the not-too-distant future.

Oddly, most parents are very pleased, and it is the school administrators who complain. They suddenly have to find language teachers.

Affy, the way to correct (or more accurately, complement) an entry is to post messages in its forum.

/* Pulls a bit of Rant-o-meter out of his and places it on a napkin */

Montana, is today your birthday? I thought you said something about candles before.

Hmmm...

I wonder if any of those languages will be English...

Contemplation

I find myself talking in foreign languages all the time. French is my first language *which is why i refuse to speak it... type it on the other hand * followed by English, then Spanish, and most recently Mandarin. I can fake italian and portuguese, and don't understand un bitter de German .

My only problem is getting the languages straight... I'm often speaking Spanglish, Sprench, Franglish, and any other such gobbled languages. Plus, having learned many colloquial phrases from Norway, Russia, etc. etc. etc. I can often spout weird phrases without knowing the literal definitions, which is a shame. I wish there were babel fish about

Hello Elephant.

You are an interesting handle.

Please post something ('Hi' will do) in koan or merchant.

*I shall water B-17 now*

Smilie.

*returns from the Zaphodista forum after posting a response to Smiley Ben which she suspects will get moderated (so she saved a copy)*

Contemplation took the thought out of my head. No offense, d'Elaphant, but the New Jersey accent is far from the most euphonious one in this country.

Sporky, with that linguistic background, you are a man of the future. Mike emailed me tonight about doujinshi. He doesn't care if it's a Japanese word! He just knows what it is. As for your aversion to French, is the Academy still going to all lengths to preserve their language's Gallic purity?

I'm having a bit of fun with the new translator at that sparse search engine (the one with two g's and two o's, I wonder if that will get moderated?).

It spit out this (imagine it with a Jersey accent - ba da bing! Sporky, maybe you can interpret the translation?).


After US president wants to give no official press conferences in the future to George W. Bush more, it renounces also to one of its favourite occupations: the writing of private enamels. The private E-Mail correspondence could be published in the context of the Freedom OF information act, so Bush in its reason. Enamels may be published after US right under certain conditions, since they are considered as government documents. The decision fell it heavily, since it was a glowing trailer of the electronic messages, confessed it before the congress of the US Zeitungsverleger. Particularly gladly it wrote his father former president George Bush and its daughters. George W. Bush is under the E-Mail address - [email protected] - attainable.


And Lil, my fellow New Jerseyians laugh at my accent, especially the way I say "egg" and "leg," a cause of great anxiety when I was 5.

Alas, I know neither koan nor merchant. I do however have a cold.

::passes d"Elephant some hot :: I got tea instead if you like. I find hot fluids help with colds a lot. ::sips his own ::

*staggers in from private apartments*

I've finished my taxes! *falls senseless onto sofa*

Congrats Lil!

*is currently pondering if this little bungalow was listed on her tax papers *

SHHH! Eglon! Bad! ::draps a trenchcoat over LIl so she dosen't get a chill::

Oh frell... taxes. I almost forgot that.

Taxation without representation is unfair. Taxation with representation is expensive.

Contemplation

Hey all.

My Dad and brother being aeroplane enthusiasts I got dragged of to many an airshow when I was younger. I never minded too much, but the thing I could never understand was that they would take photos of all the planes flying across the sky, which as we always had a pants camera meant that when they got them back all you could see were little blobs in the blue. These would be stuck carefully in a photo album and pored over for hours: "Look its a B794!", "Yeah, and catch a glance at this Nig 13!". It must be a man thing.

Right I'll go and have a look at the pimlico thing and then I'm off to a protest. It's so unlike me. I do wish it weren't raining though.

Oh, with the language education thing. A friend told me that if you are brought up bilingual the language centre of you brain has patches of both languages in splotches all over it, overlapping and intermingling. If you learn a foriegn language later in life, your first language is a big round blob in the centre and then the other languages you learn are in concentric (do I mean this?) rings aroung the outside. I worry a bit about how she knows this, but there you go.

Personally, if unconcious aquisition when we are younger has not taken place, I think it would help if we knew at least something about the grammer of our own language. When I was supposed to be learning french our teacher would always be saying things like "...and this is similar to a continuous tense in English. The verb..." and I would sit there and think. "Eh? What's a continous tense? What's a tense? What's a verb?" Now I know these things I find it much easier to understand the language I want to know. It is a bit like maths. Although, sometimes I get a bit irritated that I know quite a lot about the language, without being able to speak it. But then I am truly the worst language learner you have ever met That could be construed as a challenge. So be it).

That was a bit long. Sorry. When the link is working, it's working.

The best picture I have ever seen from an airshow involved several wheel blocks, placed on the tarmac, the stair thingy standing near them, and a sign saying "STEALTH AIRCRAFT"

The languages thing is a horrible mess in the states, especially with the intergration of Ebonics into educational programs. Ebonics is not a language, it is a dialect. Just as Down Eastern is a dialect I know from back home. English is the language that they relate to, and is what needs to be taught. I mean, sure, it would be wonderful to know how to sound like someone living in the southern reaches of France, but without knowing how to speak French itself, you end up being at a loss for talking to some one of a different French dialect.

Teach the roots of the language first. That way everyone starts out on the same page.

Contemplation