Duly Noted

I came across an interesting warning on a bottle of antiseptic wash:

At first I thought "Woah!  This sounds like nasty stuff!" but then I realised that "Avoid contact with brain" could apply to virtually anything.  Except maybe cerebrospinal fluid.

Language Inconsitencies

It's not that common to think about the oddities of your native language too much, idiosyncrasies and quirks are so ingrained in you that don't even notice them.  At least that is, you don't until someone who's still learning the language makes a logically correct but syntactically incorrect statement - such as yesterday when Phoebe said "Look!  That lady is cigaretting." 

Neither of us corrected her and I suspect we may adopt it as a household in joke.  But that aside, it does kind of make sense.  "The lady is smoking a cigarette" is contracted to "The lady is smoking" but of course, the lady isn't smoking (unless she's standing too close to a fire) so really perhaps you should contract it to "The lady is cigaretting" - however that just sounds wrong.  But why?

Money Well Spent

"So Phoebe, what was your favourite thing at the Zoo?"

"The bouncy castle."

German Compound Words

I've been having a friendly debate with a German speaking colleague at work about the utility of German compound words.  She thinks they're great, I think they are confusing and pointless but also strangely amusing, which is why I keep the debate going.  A case in point, I was excited to come across a new one today: Flüssigmetallblasensäulenreaktor or liquid-metal bubble column reactor from our good friends at the Karlsruher Flüssigmetalllabor (Karlsruhe Liquid-metal Laboratory) itself another cool example of the genre which amazingly manages to create a word with a triple "L", excellent Elling there from the lads at KALLA as they are confusingly known - you'd think it would be KF, wouldn't you?

Interestingly after reiterating the same old guff that she thinks they are great and doesn't have a problem working out which word is which she then misread it as Flüssigmetallblasensäurenreaktor or liquid-metal bubble acids reactor - which could be a problem if you were trying to build one.  If I had been making a point that would have proved it, whatever it was.  Fortunately I wasn't, they just make me laugh.

Anyway, I don't see how liquidmetalbubblecolumnreactor is in any way better than liquid-metal bubble column reactor - unless you are tweeting about them.

That is all.

Mrs Mungo On Streetview

This isn't exactly news, but I finally got round to grabbing some screenshots.  The good Mrs Mungo was snapped on Streetview.  Interestingly she totally failed to spot the car driving past with the giant camera on the roof!  Also note the slight failure of Google's face blurring technology in the first grab.  Google thinks her face looks like a shoulder, not quite sure what to make of that.  And why is she driving my car?  Why is she getting in without closing the passenger door?  These mysteries will never be solved.

New Moon

I had another go at photographing the moon a while back.  This time I actually thought a little about what I was doing and used filters and such like.  They definitely turned out better:

Supersized Toys

I think the manager of our local Sainsbury's has been spending too much time playing with his foam farm: