The Onion on Syria's chemical weapons.
I'm certainly pro-immigrant and pro-foreign-language, but I have to empathize with the anecdote here:
In 2004, then-Maryland Comptroller William Donald Schaefer (D), a former mayor and governor, chastised immigrants who don’t speak English well after a Spanish-speaking cashier at a McDonald’s had trouble understanding his order.
“I don’t want to adjust to another language,” Schaefer said. “This is the United States. I think they ought to adjust to us.”I agree. I don't spend a lot of time in fast food places, but I do occasionally call customer service--and this is more an outsourcing issue than an immigration issue--and when you're already at the point where you have to pick up the phone (i.e., your issue is too complex to resolve online), the last thing you need is to struggle to be understood. Look: my parents are not easy to understand, and I travel enough that I'm constantly depending on other people to understand me in my native language. I'm not suggesting that it's everyone's job to learn English; I'm merely saying that it's not a terrible thing to want to be easily understood.
In other linguistic matters, forensic linguistics is a fascinating thing. This made me think about how much we misunderstand each other in life, in general.
Some handy household tips. I know #8 may come in handy for those of you whose small child tends to fall off the bed ;).
I certainly won't disagree with much of Joanna Blythman's message, but I have to ask, who is she to draw the line for too cerebral? Why is " avoiding meat to save the planet" a bad thing? Where I do hear her is the obsession with ultimate nutrition at the expense of everything else. As you know, I'm all about food that tastes amazing that happens to be healthy. I could only roll my eyes when (1) mom asked me what was so healthy about whatever I was eating at a given moment; (2) RM asked me whether roasting food--as I was doing at the time--increased the nutritional value (actually, I shrugged and said probably not, but I liked the way it tasted); and (3) someone recently asked me the opposite, about how isn't food healthiest, raw? Well, maybe, but I personally like it cooked (most of the time), and I'm hardly malnourished. Not every food decision is driven by a complex nutritional calculation; in fact, none is. If you eat real, plant-based food, you don't have to sweat the details. Apart from the B12 supplements if it's not already added to other food you eat.
This morning I quickly linked to that delightful Post article about McDonald's in Russia. I think I told you that I had mixed feelings about the landmark McDonald's in Budapest: a symbol of the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, yet also a symbol of everything wrong with the food system. Anyway, as Russia politicizes McDonald's, it's time to pick a side in the Chick Fil A battle.
You know by now that it's silly for most meat-eaters (i.e., any who don't subsist entirely on grass-fed, organic meat) to think vegetarians are the ones getting too much soy (we'll save the "is there such a thing" debate for another day), but here's Stephen Colbert's reminder that corn poses a similar paradox:
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| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| U.S. Agriculture & Drought Disaster - Bruce Babcock | ||||
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