Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
According to the folks at Houghton Mifflin, every high school grad should be familiar with the words in the list below. I’m not surprised that I was unfamiliar with the word abstemious given its meaning, and moiety is now part of my vocabulary.
- abjure
- abrogate
- abstemious
- acumen
- antebellum
- auspicious
- belie
- bellicose
- bowdlerize
- chicanery
- chromosome
- churlish
- circumlocution
- circumnavigate
- deciduous
- deleterious
- diffident
- enervate
- enfranchise
- epiphany
- equinox
- euro
- evanescent
- expurgate
- facetious
- fatuous
- feckless
- fiduciary
- filibuster
- gamete
- gauche
- gerrymander
- hegemony
- hemoglobin
- homogeneous
- hubris
- hypotenuse
- impeach
- incognito
- incontrovertible
- inculcate
- infrastructure
- interpolate
- irony
- jejune
- kinetic
- kowtow
- laissez faire
- lexicon
- loquacious
- lugubrious
- metamorphosis
- mitosis
- moiety
- nanotechnology
- nihilism
- nomenclature
- nonsectarian
- notarize
- obsequious
- oligarchy
- omnipotent
- orthography
- oxidize
- parabola
- paradigm
- parameter
- pecuniary
- photosynthesis
- plagiarize
- plasma
- polymer
- precipitous
- quasar
- quotidian
- recapitulate
- reciprocal
- reparation
- respiration
- sanguine
- soliloquy
- subjugate
- suffragist
- supercilious
- tautology
- taxonomy
- tectonic
- tempestuous
- thermodynamics
- totalitarian
- unctuous
- usurp
- vacuous
- vehement
- vortex
- winnow
- wrought
- xenophobe
- yeoman
- ziggurat
If you’re a Simpsons fan, the word chicanery should be familiar to you (“Oh, Mr. Homer…What has reduced you to such cheap chicanery?”). If you remember your Phil Hartman-era SNL, you might recall his use of the word jejune (“Compulsion” by Calvin Kleen). Monty Python fans will have run into a form of expurgate (the bookstore skit), lugubrious appears in both Lou Reed lyrics (The Original Wrapper) and an old Zippy the Pinhead comic strip and I recall the word sanguine being used in an 80’s-era X-Men comic.
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My Articles at Global Nerdy
Over at the tech blog I write, Global Nerdy, I’ve got these stories:
- Lara Croft, Then and Now: A review in pictures of the evolution of everyone’s favourite hot archaeologist.
- Advertising: Best Left to the Professionals? Ad execs are unimpressed with the contest submissions for Heinz ketchup’s “create you own ad” contest.
- Sony’s Very Special Screws: Maybe Sony thinks that they’re selling stuff to the U.S. military.
- Zombies Less Annoying Than MySpace Users: I’ve always suspected it, but thanks to two stories from last week about Apple Stores, I now have proof.
- A Million Fools and Their Money Have Been Parted: Believe it or not, a million Zunes will have been sold by the end of June. I had no idea there were that many people out there with serious head injuries.
John Philip Green, Pete Forde and I went out one night in Portland to check out Ground Kontrol, an place that’s both bar and arcade devoted to 80’s pinball and video games (I wrote a little bit about the arcade in Global Nerdy). Along the way, we passed by a glowing red neon sign that proclaimed “Jesus is Lord” and couldn’t resist posing beneath it. You know, just in case The Rapture happened that night, or perhaps we might get discovered as supermodels. You never know.
We took the Max, Portland’s light rail system, from the convention center to the stop at Skidmore Fountain. The place’s name is so spot on that it’s downright Dickensian:
The light rail stop at Skidmore Fountain, Portland, Oregon.
Here’s John, posing underneath the sign. Jesus, please send him some venture capital!
John looks like he believes. Testify!
Pete struck a good pose:
Pete: “Dear Jesus, please give me a brand new drum kit…”
And here I am. Yea, though I walk through the valley of darkness, I have no fear, for I have a big honkin’ accordion:
Me: “Yay-us! The power of the accordion compels you!”
Here’s a great shot that New York-based Ruby guy Sebastian Delmont posted to Flickr — it’s of that pre-keynote performance that I did with RailsConf organizer Chad Fowler:
Click the image to see it on its Flickr page
Texas-based Ruby guy Sean McMains took a video of the whole performance:
Having trouble choosing deciding whether to have an Egg McMuffin or a Big Mac? In Japan, you can get both in a single package: the Tamago Double Mac (tamago is Japanese for “egg”). You get the two burgers for the Big Mac-ness, bacon and poached egg for Egg McMuffin goodness, pepper sauce to make it its own thing, and optional cheese.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
Adding an egg to a burger isn’t anything new. The Kiwis put fried eggs on their burgers, and fried eggs are optional at the American chain Fatburger.
To push the Tamago Double Mac over the top, you could give it the “Fat Kreme” treatment: replace the bun with a Krispy Kreme donut sliced bagel-style.
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Meanwhile, Over at Global Nerdy…
The image that goes with the Global Nerdy story abou tkids huffing compressed air. Click it to see the story.
Here’s a reminder: Global Nerdy, the tech news site that my buddy George and I write, is an ongoing concern! Here are the most recent stories:
- Spam’s “80-200″ Rule. 80% of the world’s spam — and remember, they say that about 90% of all email traffic is spam — comes from 200 operators.
- Makin’ the Gas Smell Like Ass. I knew kids huffed no-stick Pam and Pledge furniture spray to get high, but did you know they also huffed the compressed air you use to get rid of dust?
- iPod Amnesty Bin at Zune Headquarters. Ther Zune team’s internal jab at the iPod.
- Dialog Box of the Week. Its buttons are labelled in such a way that you can’t tell which one initiates which action.
- Why PR Doesn’t Work for High Tech (or: Guy Kawasaki is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!) Guy and I differ on why PR doesn’t work for geeks.