Pretty funny if the association is familiar. Otherwise, probably pretty incomprehensible. [via]

Update: That’s more like it: “kiwi en kiwi gaan nergens over,” among others. (Thanks Jacob!)

• Design: flowerlike lightbulb unfurls as it warms up. [via sensory impact]
• Craziness: every year two Greek monasteries bombard each other with fireworks. [via Nemo Ramjet]
• Life/art mutual imitation: A British explorer disappears in the Amazon jungle, while looking for a lost city. Attempts to find his remains, and the city he searched for, are complicated by the fact that he kept his travel plans a secret — even to the point of releasing false coordinates. And this around the time that everyone was reading H. Rider Haggard. Just who was fooling who, here? BLDGBLOG has the story.
• Gadget-lust: a comfy chair mounted on tank treads. For the long trek to the coffee machine, naturally. [via fosfor gadgets]
• Gadget-lust redux: the coffee machine. Includes the important observation that the coffee apparatus has to be simple enough to be operated by a person who hasn’t had any coffee yet.
• Bird-brained: I won’t comment without reading the paper, but the blogosphere is aflame about the abilities of starlings to learn non-regular grammars, and the inabilities of the popular press to report this stuff competently. (Exhibits A, B, C.) It’s interesting research, that unfortunately everyone seems to misinterpret (including the Science reviewers of the 2004 paper in which Fitch & Hauser reported related results for tamarin monkeys, who —this is just unattributed gossip, mind you— apparently made them cut descriptions of various control conditions which are essential for ruling out some trivial objections). I sense a post coming on…
• More bird-brained antics: Language Log has been infected with bird (syntax) flu. (Warning: Psychologists the condition linguists doctors examined suffered first described agree: it’s highly contagious, and the symptoms are bloody awful.)
• Great potential: a plagiarism contest (phrases or larger, no single-word citations). [via Maud Newton]

More quotes after the break:

[A]fter the verb — merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out — the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the flourish to a man’s signature — not necessary, but pretty.

…

A writer’s ideas must be a good deal confused, a good deal out of line and sequence, when he starts out to say that a man met a counselor’s wife in the street, and then right in the midst of this so simple undertaking halts these approaching people and makes them stand still until he jots down an inventory of the woman’s dress. That is manifestly absurd. It reminds a person of those dentists who secure your instant and breathless interest in a tooth by taking a grip on it with the forceps, and then stand there and drawl through a tedious anecdote before they give the dreaded jerk. Parentheses in literature and dentistry are in bad taste.

…

This explains why, whenever a person says ‘sie’ to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.

…

I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

…

In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.

I’m going to stop there, before I reprint the entire article. Read it.

All right, perhaps one more:

There are people in the world who will take a great deal of trouble to point out the faults in a religion or a language, and then go blandly about their business without suggesting any remedy. I am not that kind of person. I have shown that the German language needs reforming. Very well, I am ready to reform it. At least I am ready to make the proper suggestions. Such a course as this might be immodest in another; but I have devoted upward of nine full weeks, first and last, to a careful and critical study of this tongue, and thus have acquired a confidence in my ability to reform it which no mere superficial culture could have conferred upon me. [...] My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.

(Promo poster by Free Range Studios. Thanks to E for the headsup.)

It’s hard to believe anyone could be this stupid, it looks an awful lot like a hoax. But if so, it’s a clever and funny one, and nobody is claiming authorship.