I love the moments when traveling where you can’t tell what’s part of the foreign culture and what’s just a misunderstanding. At least, I love them afterwards.

( misunderstandings and misadventures )

I posted a bunch of photos from my trip to Australia. (Stories from the trip will be following shortly ( Read more... )

One of the services that Google Voice provides is telling you via email what it thinks people have said in the voicemails they have left. It's often comically wrong, but rarely as much so as when dealing with voicemail left by my Japanese grandmother. To be fair, she not only has a thick accent, but she has grammatical constructions that ( Read more... )

First, there are a couple songs I'd like to recommend, which I know through fennel.

( songs for relieving stress and bringing joy )

Here are the best books I read in 2010 (some came out before):

OUTSTANDING:

fiction

• The Price of Spring, by Daniel Abraham
  The final book in "The Long Price Quartet" fantasy series, which began with A Shadow in Summer. I liked, but did not love, the first book in the series -- I thought the world was really intriguing, but I didn't really bond ( Read more... )

Same question as last time, only this time dealing with race and ethnicity ( Read more... )

If you were filling out a questionnaire and it asked for your gender (and you knew that thousands of others were also filling out this questionnaire), what list of options would you want to see? Assume that this is a forced choice question (radio buttons).

Edit: check out the explanation, along with more questions, here. And thanks!

Saturday afternoon I was betrayed by yams. Well, yams and my own stupidity ( Read more... )

Has anyone ridden the Amtrak Coast Starlight (runs between L.A. and Seattle), or traveled overnight on an Amtrak train going elsewhere? It seems like it could be a more fun and comfortable way to travel to Seattle than flying, though not terribly efficient. Still, I could spend a day working in comfort with a really nice view. However, it seems ( Read more... )

I had fun posting a craigslist ad today that I don't think anyone is going to answer or necessarily even read (not that many people want just two cardboard boxes, apparently, and I can't blame them really). So I'm posting it here to share and to preserve it past the time when CL will delete it.

( the largest Amazon box the world has ever known )