Born on State Highway 1

In different countries, people speak different languages. That includes onomatapoeia, as I learned in high-school Japanese. Apparently dogs go, “Wan! Wan!” Stupid Japanese people. Dogs go, “Woof! Woof!” This is why you lost the war. NationMaster (which is pretty cool) has a list of different onomatapoeia from around the world for the sound a cock makes. Cock.

The list is below, but that’s not the point of this post. I have found something very much cooler. Quack Project has mp3s of little kids from around the world doing their locally flavoured impression of farm-animal noises. In addition to being fascinating, it is also four times as cute as a button. And it’s not just the language filters on the ears. Animals, like cows and birds, actually have different accents depending on where they’re from.

Here’s the list:

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ReadWriteWeb have posted a little analysis of Obama’s inaugural speech by running it through Wordle to create a word cloud. On RWW, you can compare it to Bush’s speech upon re-election four years ago, some Clinton, Reagan and Lincoln. But here is just the Obama word cloud:

I learned a huge amount of stuff as a kid playing role-playing games. Okay, I still do play RPGs. I meet with a few friends to play D&D (which I never actually played as a kid) every few weeks. Resource books about different historical periods were probably the main source of info – Arthurian legend, medieval Europe, Lovecraft, etc.

Anyway, here’s a neat resource, that would probably be pretty sweet for anyone wanting to write fiction set in the decade. Dirty ’30s has lots of sweet info about the Mafia, Nazis, Commies, gumshoes, jazz, and all that other cool shit from the over-romanticised Depression times. Yay, art deco, etc. Fun times. Kind of.