Miscellaneous rambling, and bragging about my kids.

I woulda sworn they were different too – guess I never used homophone.

of course, you could then have pointed out that the child isn't so much intelligent as he/she is a really good computer. To prove intelligence, you would have to perform a Turing test on him/her.

Then proceed to have a deep philosophical discussion about Nitzsche and the origin of good and evil, Zoraostrianism, and the meaning of Hamlet. That ought to end that silliness. The child is nothing more than a Chinese room. 😉

ROB

The other night we're over the neighbors for dinner and playing the "Do you know how smart my 7yr old is?" game. I don't love that game. "Do you guys know what a homophone is?" the neighbor asks.

I honestly try to remember. She didn't say homonym, which I know. She said homophone. I take a guess that it's a word that has multiple meanings depending on the pronunciation (like read as in REED, versus read as in RED). "Nope," says the 7yr old, "It's two words that are spelled different, but sound the same. Like meet and meat."

"Then what's a homonym?" I ask.

He thinks about this and says, "They're the same thing."

I shake my head at that. That can't be right. So as casually as possible I pull out the cell phone, open up a web browser and go googling for it.

Sure enough, kid's right. Homophone and homonym mean the same thing. When the hell did THAT happen?

By the way, the word I was thinking of was "heteronym."

Update: You know, it's actually more complicated than this. Maven's Word of the Day tells me that homonym is the superclass to which both homophone and homograph belong. Specifically, a homonym is supposed to be spelled and pronounced the same (such as "grizzly bear" and "bear witness"). A homophone is what the neighbor said – sound the same, spelled differently. Interestingly a homograph is the thing I was thinking of, spelled the same but pronounced differently, like "I object to that large object."

Apparently a heteronym is a particular type of homonym where the word has to have an entirely different meaning. So I'm guessing that this means "I will read the book" and "I have read the book" would be a homograph but not a heteronym. "Look for minute details for the next minute" would be a heteronym. I think.

I'd like to blame it on Lukas, but we all knew that it was going to be a spectacular failure, didn't we?

Read more…

JD: Let's face the facts about me and you
A love unspecified
Though I'm proud to call you 'Chocolate Bear'
The crowd will always talk and stare…

Turk: I feel exactly those feelings too, and that's why I keep them inside.
Cause this Bear can't bear the world's disdain
And sometimes its easier to hide than explain…

Together:
Our guy love
That's all it is
Guy love
He's mine, I'm his
There's nothing gay about it in our eyes.
You ask me about this thing we share–
And he tenderly replies,
'It's guy love between two guys…'

Turk: "Closer than the average man and wife!"

JD: "That's why our matching bracelets say 'Turk & JD'"

Turk: "You know I'll stick by you for the rest of my life!"

JD: "You're the only man who's ever been inside of me-e-e-e!!!"

Turk (stops singing): "Whoa, whoa, I just took out his appendix…"

It carries on from there…

Today, at the mall:

Katherine: "This is like a library."

Daddy: "That's an interesting idea. How do you figure the mall is like a library?"

Katherine: "Well, look. Nobody's talking."

Daddy: "This is true."

Blow up Buddha statues, get killed.

…Separately, an assailant gunned down an Afghan lawmaker who, under the former Taliban regime, oversaw the destruction of two Buddha statues carved into a cliff.

Maulavi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi, who was the Taliban's governor of Bamiyan province when the fifth-century Buddha statues were blown up with dynamite and artillery in March 2001, was killed on his way to Friday prayers in Kabul, said Zulmai Khan, Kabul's deputy police chief.

It works even better if you put the sponge on a plate with a quarter inch of water in it. It'll keep the sponge from drying out and melting when it gets so hot.

Hats off to Scrubs, hell of a show!

Guys: are you worried about a little thinning on top?

You may want to consider having another cup of coffee.
German researchers said caffeine not only blocks the chemical known to damage hair follicles, but it can also stimulate growth.

But, don't get too excited just yet.
The study also found that you'd need about 60 cups of java a day to start seeing the effects.

Instead, the researchers are hoping to create a caffeine solution that can be applied to the scalp.

So apparently the solution is to actually take a shower in coffee?

I'd like to see the mouse that got shot up with the equivalent of 60 cups of coffee a day. Run that frickin maze in 0.3 seconds I'll bet.

I thought we were doing well, but I see on Yahoo news that  unemployment claims are up by the largest amount in 16months.

Sounds like as good a time as any to plug my book, Top Tips to Survive The Layoff.

🙂  Hey, it's my site, I can do what I want. 😛

Seriously, though, I've actually heard a number of sources lately speaking of the whole "what to do with yourself when you're out of work" problem.  A friend of mine recently lost his job again, making a total of something like 5 positions in 4 years.  (Not totally his fault, he's in sales engineering and when you're the junior guy, you're always the first to go.  Catch 22.)