Kategoria: in English

WACK

After buying flights to Warsaw yesterday and regis­te­ring as a non-compe­titor at this year’s worlds, I’ve been strea­ming an endless series of memo­ries related to footbag events and friends. The sport is one of the two random big things in my life without which I would be some­body else.

This picture by @etienneruggeri is my all-time favo­rite on-the-court shot, taken 2011 in Paris. WACK is what you can hear Frankie say when he loses that net battle against a guy shorter than him and so unflexible he has to round­house kick ass-first to reach the other side.

Interlingual homography

Homo­graphs are words of iden­tical appea­rance but of diffe­rent meaning and etymo­logy. Bear, the verb, and bear, the animal, are examples of English homo­graphs, while kuusi, the number six, and kuusi, the spruce, are often-cited Finnish ones. The words listed below are homo­graphs across these two languages. The trans­la­tions here are minimal; many of the words have other meanings in one or both languages, which the Wiktio­nary articles linked to will detail.

Jatka artik­ke­liin Inter­lin­gual homo­graphy

homo­graph trans­la­tion into English trans­la­tion into Finnish
peloton fear­less pääjoukko (kilpa­pyö­räi­lyssä)
pimento dark­ness kirsik­ka­paprika
helmet pearls kypärä
manner conti­nent tapa
marina grumble vene­sa­tama
murein tende­rest mureiini
pellet clowns pelletti
peruke (fishing) leader peruukki
rabbit rabbis kani
tanner ground parkit­sija
turbot turboc­har­gers piik­ki­kam­pela
vinous oblique­ness viini­mäinen

Open doubles net final

For the first time since 2011, tonight Matti Pohjola​ and I will play in the open doubles net final of the IFPA World Footbag Cham­pionship tour­na­ment. If you are not in Copen­hagen to cheer for us in Nørre­bro­hallen, tune in at 6 pm (Danish time) for live cove­rage of the event at http://​www​.ustream​.tv/​c​h​a​n​n​e​l​/​w​o​r​l​d​s2015!

Independence day calendar

Here’s a little Christmas treat for anyone into geography trivia: a calendar of inde­pen­dence anni­ver­sa­ries from around the world. Help your­self to a copy and impress your friends with the useless­ness of things you remember with seemingly no effort.

I copied all the dates and desc­rip­tions from the List of national inde­pen­dence days on Wiki­pedia and simply refor­matted the data into an iCalendar file. If you spot errors or omis­sions, please cont­ri­bute to the original article: I have it on my watch­list.

You can leech on the file I’ve uploaded, but note that it’s slow, read-only, and will one day go offline without a warning. The other option is to down­load the .ics, import it to your calendar app of choice and edit it as you wish. I make no copy­right claims.

A Finnish version without the expla­na­tory desc­rip­tion texts is also avai­lable.

Femoroacetabular impingement

An x-ray of my pelvic area, with signs of femo­roace­ta­bular impin­ge­ment (FAI) in both hip joints. The extra bone growth, worse in the left (circled), causes fric­tion and tear to the carti­lage surroun­ding the rim of the socket, which is basically why I’m in need of Sock-eez™ at thirty.

Factors leading to this condi­tion include “deve­lop­mental hip abnor­ma­lity together with […] acti­vi­ties invol­ving recur­rent motion of the legs within a suprap­hy­sio­logic range” [w]. (Now why does that ring a bell?) Right now, my hopes of ever retur­ning to courts are slim, but I’m still waiting to consult an ortho­pedic surgeon, hope­fully within a couple of weeks.