First LadyGuy: Update!

When Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy, I wondered what we would call Bill.

We now have word from Mr. Clinton himself: he would like to be called the First Laddie.

[He mentioned this on a visit to Aspen; here's the corresponding article.]

Let them eat cake...

One of the many things I enjoy doing when I'm not working myself to death is baking cakes. This summer I've had occasion to bake two thoroughly geeky cakes.

The first occasion was a small party that I had with a few fellow students, to celebrate the fact that we didn't take incompletes in a notoriously difficult phonetics course:



The cake itself was a chocolate layer cake, and the frostings were: chocolate buttercream, white chocolate buttercream, and a mixture of the two (for the lighter brown).

And yes, that hideous decorating job is an attempt at a spectrogram. I actually recorded myself saying the word "done" (in a frame sentence, no less), looked at the spectrogram in praat, and then tried to replicate that on the cake. All I can say is that I somehow managed to avoid getting frosting on my laptop in the process.

The second cake was in honor of a friend's birthday, and was a lolcake:



The cake itself was a yellow cake, with vanilla buttercream frosting (and a bit of chocolate buttercream from the previous cake, plus a few strawberries).

For the kitty pidgin on the cake, i opened with the classic o hai greeting, followed by the familiar i iz [food] trope, and then the classic can has construction. Finally, the assertion srsly.

Both cakes were very tasty.

Decimate!

I recently watched the three-part finale of the current Doctor Who series; I'll remain spoiler-free, but it was for the most part a really fantastic end to a really fantastic third series, and I'm looking forward to the upcoming fourth series (though not the long wait).

One of my favorite moments in the finale involved some cheerfully malevolent word-play pondering the precise definition of "decimate" -- riffing a bit on the fact that there is one version of the word that means roughly "to cause massive amounts of totally awesome destruction" and another version of the word that means "to destroy 1/10". It's a deliberate manipulation of the interplay between creative, expressive uses of language and precise, literally descriptive uses of language.

Apparently Ryan North over at qwantz.com has been pondering the same thing.