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

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.