wombat_socho

So I got a letter from CyberCoders, which as far as I know is not associated with the FSB, asking if I'd be interested in an Office Manager job, and the funny thing to me was that the recruiter's family name was Frayer. In Russian thieves' slang, frayer is the collective name for non-thieves, "suckers", or marks. Well, I thought it was funny.

Nobody else got the joke, and I wound up talking about Russian in the comments. What I wasn't willing to go into at any length was that after you master the Cyrillic alphabet, the next big hurdle is what they called at DLI "prepositional verbs of motion", which is not what this Wikipedia article calls them, but since this is my LJ post, we'll do it the way I learned it. See, in English, you can say "Priyanka [went to the strip club] with her friends" and everybody will assume she went in with her droogies and got an eyeful of boobs and butts. In Russian, this is horribly imprecise. There is a distinction between going to the club and not going in (ona podoshola k Crazy Horse) and going to the club and going in (ona voshla na Crazy Horse) and a few other variations on the theme. This looks a lot like the graphic we used in the Basic Russian course to help us get our heads around the notion:

Anyway, thought people might be interested. Comment on Facebook if you want to.

So I slept in when I should have gotten up at 0300 to do Live at Five, which meant the garbage didn't go out either. One more thing to take care of Sunday night. Had coffee, knocked out an In The Mailbox post, and went up to Chantilly for chikuns*; after that, headed in on 66 to the VA, making use of the Google Maps navigator. This works well enough for me that I doubt I'll ever bother to invest in a Tomtom or similar device, especially since the nagging from this app when it thinks I'm going the wrong way is annoying enough.

Anyhow, I drew a third-year med student from Georgetown this time, and he asked all the right questions. Quick consult with Dr. Laredo (King of the Leg Cutters!) resulted in Mepilex instead of Medihoney, because the latter has been melting all over everything, and an order for a new set of support stockings. Booyah.On the way back, the navigation app seemed bound and determined to stick me in the slow-moving flow on 695/295, but I fooled the app - got off 695 at 6th Street, doubled back on M to South Capitol, and instead of getting trapped in another mess on 295 where South Capitol splits off, I followed my memories onto Overlook Drive, which runs along the west side of Bolling AFB/NRL until finally dumping you onto 295 near Blue Plains. I made much better time on Overlook, and by the time I finally got onto 295, it was moving well enough that I got from Anacostia to Springfield in about twenty minutes of high-speed freeway driving.

Unfortunately Old Keene Mill was slow and poky all the way from the Byrd Library to Rolling Road, but there was no way to make a move for most of the way.

Not a lot of Ingressing today.

Larry Correia posted the seventh Christmas Noun story.
They'll never make it into a movie, unfortunately.

The Administration's actions on Cuba are despicable and pathetic, and I wish i could say I'm surprised, but I'm not.
The same goes for Sony and The Interview, although it's Hollywood and one expects them to be spineless when not confronting conservatives.

*The WGW wasn't in, but service was excellent and food awesome as usual.

"Unemployed? Don't worry..."

(h/t Jim Geraghty's newsletter)

Sinfest reads from the book of love.
Terminal Lance examines re-enlistment incentives.
Moe Lane spotlights a deplorable truth about steampunk.

Apparently not.

Although this post by Richard MacEnroe at Three Beers Later sums up the way I've come to feel about Irish history, along with P.J. O'Rourke's quip that God gave peat to the Irish because nobody else in the world got drunk enough to try and burn dirt.*

Best wishes to all my relatives who are more Irish than Latino.

More later about my weekend in the hospital.






*He may be forgiven for momentarily having forgotten the Russians.

Naomi Klein can't tell the difference between unconstitutional government action and entirely legal action by a corporation. What a complete retard. And she presumes to lecture conservatives on...well, pretty much anything?

(Via Computerworld, an excellent article about how the Egyptian protesters are managing to find ways around the government shutdown of the Internet and mobile phone networks.)

Being the pessimist I am, I can't help seeing a rerun of 1979's revolution in Iran here, with Mubarak playing the role of Shah - except the Shah was more realistic about his chances once the Army turned on him. It's not entirely clear whether the Egyptian Army has done that yet, and I hope it's not the case, because then this really will be a repeat of the Iranian Revolution. Those of us who are old enough remember how well that went under Carter 1.0. I don't expect the sequel under Carter 2.0 to be handled any better; the military isn't the hollowed-out shell it was in the 1970s, but most of it is tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment.

I'm watching this instead:



Neil Gaiman is a very, very lucky man.

Well, no jury duty today. I'll call back this afternoon to see if my group gets called in tomorrow. As much as I fancy the idea of serving on a jury, I hope they don't call tomorrow, since I'm supposed to be at the tax mines and I kinda need the money.

There's been an ad running on Fox News (the default TV channel in the tax mines) for Rosland Capital featuring G. Gordon Liddy and three cartoonish, pantomime constructs: a house, a bank, and a piggy bank. We have the TV muted, and the closed captioning is hilariously sporadic. so I have no idea what the G-man is saying, but it's pretty obvious that he's talking about the collapse in value of houses, failing banks, and inflation raping your savings. As he walks by the house, bank, and finally the piggy bank, he whacks the air valve on each, and they deflate, which is pretty amusing until he gets to the piggy bank. I have the same thought every time I see the ad: poor piggy.

Related, but more hilarious: