My friend Omar took this pic.

The English language seems to be very elusive to these people.

This is one of my favorites.  The redneck do-rag is a nice touch.

This classic is from a Pat Buchanan “English-only” “conferenece.”  I think if one advocates monoglotism, one should at least master one language.  Monoglotism is so boring, don’t you think?

Following the hellenistic pattern, I coined a word for these English-monoglotists who seem to lack mastery of one language, hemiglots.

To wit:

Polyglot - speaker of multiple languages
Monoglot - speaker of one language
Hemiglot - speaker of half a language

More…

Let’s conclude with a shout out to the dumb-down filter from which most of these people get their “information.” Of course, it’s misspelled.

Ed Schultz played this on his show today. I lost my lunch.

This is simply fascinating.  The Ottowa Citizen reports on work by linguists which has resulted in the first evidence of a linguistic link between the Old World and New World.

The landmark discovery, initially proposed two years ago by U.S. researcher Edward Vajda, represents the only known link between any Old World language and the hundreds of speech systems among First Nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The collection of articles by Vajda and other experts details a multitude of clear connections — nouns, verbs and key grammatical structures — between the language spoken by the Ket people of Russia’s Yenisei River region and dozens of languages used by North American aboriginal groups.

…

He found that the few remaining Ket speakers in Russia and the Dene, Gwich’in and other Athapaskan speakers in North America used almost identical words for canoe and such component parts as the prow and cross-piece.

“Finally, here was the beginning of a system that struck me as beyond the realm of chance,” Vajda wrote at the time. “At that moment, I think I realized how an archeologist must feel who peers inside a freshly opened Egyptian tomb and witnesses what no one has seen for thousands of years.”

Currently, only the Eskimo-Aleut family of aboriginal languages spoken by the Inuit of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia straddle the hemispheric divide between Asia and the Americas. Those connections aren’t surprising, given the relatively recent arrival of the Inuit to North America.

But linguists had never definitively linked any ancient, Old World language to those spoken by the Indian nations of North and South America. Their ancestors are believed to have migrated from Asia to the New World — across what was then a dried-up Bering Strait — at least 13,000 years ago.

I am spending the day in Boulder attending WordCamp Boulder 2010.  So far I have attended discussions on creating a blog community and WordPress consulting and right now I am in the middle of a talk on WordPress development.  This afternoon I’ll be attending discussions on usability testing and “What’s next for WordPress.”

So far I have met some really interesting people, some of who have traveled from out of state to attend this event. Pretty cool stuff.

The march continues. The AP reports…

A U.S. judge in Boston has ruled that a federal gay marriage ban is unconstitutional because it interferes with the right of a state to define marriage.

U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro on Thursday ruled in favor of gay couples’ rights in two separate challenges to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.

The state had argued the law denied benefits such as Medicaid to gay married couples in Massachusetts, where same-sex unions have been legal since 2004.

Tauro agreed, and said the act forces Massachusetts to discriminate against its own citizens.

Like other efforts to abridge civil rights in America’s past, this one will eventually completely fail. It is inevitable that in a few years all will be complete, i.e. DOMA undone, DADT undone and full legal gay-marriage in all 50 states, with much ugly resistance in some states.

No words necessary. Just watch.

Here is another one of these tea party congressional candidates who seems to have, to paraphrase Limbaugh, both halves of his brain tied behind his back.  Rick Barber from Alabama has a TV ad advocating the taking up arms against the government.  From Palin’s crosshairs to this, the taking arms meme is pretty consistent and dangerous.  In this interview Barber calls this a metaphor, but words mean things and there are plenty of nuts out there who will find resonance in these types of messages.

Matthews also calls him out on this other ridiculous comparison these people like to make between the plight of the American colonists and America under Obama as if we have taxation without representation.  This displays a clear lack of understanding of the casus belli of the American Revolutionary War very characteristic of these tea partiers.  With the exception of DC, Puerto Rico and the overseas possessions, we all have representation in Congress, and specifically in the House of Representatives where all tax bills originate.  The colonists were not protesting the Tea Act per se, but its imposition upon the American colonists by far off Westminster without having any representation in Parliament.  I just wish these guys would take a trip down to their local socialist public library and check some history books.

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AP photographer Alex Brandon caught a shot of Senator Al Franken sketching Senator Jeff Sessions yesterday during the Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings for Elena Kegan.

It looks like three buildings with a ship stuck on tip. From Wikipedia,

Marina Bay Sands is an integrated resort fronting Marina Bay in Singapore. Developed by Las Vegas Sands, it is billed as the world’s most expensive standalone casino property at S$8 billion (US$5.7 billion), including cost of the prime land.

The resort features a 2,560-room hotel, 120,000 sq-meter convention-exhibition center, The Shoppes mall, six restaurants, an Art & Science museum, two Sands Theatres, two floating pavilions, a casino with 500 tables and 1,600 slot machines. The complex is topped by a 340m-long SkyPark with a capacity of 3,900 people and a a 150m swimming pool, set on top of the world’s largest public cantilevered platform, which overhangs the north tower by 67m. The 51-acre resort was designed by Moshe Safdie.

The resort was officially opened with a 2-day celebration on 23 June 2010 at 3.18 pm, after a partial opening earlier in April. The museum, theatres and floating pavilions are still being built and are expected to be fully completed by December 2010.

photos via wikipedia and pixdaus

How sick is this. Toru Iwatani, original creator of the Pac-Man game was visiting Holland for their Festival Of Games exhibition. And while he was there, he brought along a special folder. (Click to enlarge) via bleedingcool