2002.10.30
Culture of the Moment
The most in-depth American dialect survey I've seen, from age-old questions like "is it a sub, hoagie, hero, or grinder"/"soda, pop, tonic, or coke" to more obscure ones like "What do you call the area of grass between the sidewalk and the road?". In Cleveland I learned that's a "tree lawn", and I'm not surprised "I have no word for this" is the most popular option around here...cities like Cambridge and Somerville don't even have 'em! (Also, answer b to this one comes as a complete surprise to me...)
There's something a little melancholy in the "I have no word for this" response for so many of the questions. (Except of course for stuff like "What do you call a drive-through liquor store"...we had those in Cleveland, but no special word for it, and here they don't exist.)
Image Link of the Moment
Cellar.org's image of the day recently was a scene where a former World Cup soccer player died on the field, hit by lightning. Yikes, what a way and time and place to go.
News of the Moment
The increasing corporatization of pot growers. Combined with the resource drain on prisons for minor drug offendors, this is just stupid. It's time to make it legal, tax the hell out of it, move on to more pressing problems.
Archive of the Last Two Years of Moments
I just revamped the monthly archive for kisrael.com. I tweaked the look of the month list, but more importantly, I used some script trickery to try to convince Google that it's static content that should be archived...