"but when the night is over and the walls start burning / when fire starts to matter ... "

... and the clock is churning / cliches and other chatter keeps our minds from learning

Five things, mostly about language in some way:

A jinormous and heavily annotated map of North American dialects (via all over). Who says which vowels where (Do you pronounce don and dawn the same? cot and caught? and so on), with extended explications of the various dialects. I'm amused to see that there's a small but noticeable distinction between native Tucson and Phoenix pronunciation, but that Wilcox is in another dialect entirely. And that Silver City is distinguishable from the rest of southern New Mexico.

A stort discussion on the expanded use of the colloquial X much construction. I'm more than a little amused that the OED's first citations are from Heathers, before it was popularized by Buffy. I haven't seen Heathers in a while -- wonder how it has aged.

Regarding Unseen Academicals, "crab bucket" is as brilliant and useful a metaphor as the Boots Theory of Economics. On the basis of that alone, Pratchett has still got it. (Also, I want that poem Trev Nutt wrote. WANT.)

A brief interview with Edward Gorey's Japanese translator, Motoyuki Shibata, starting with an extended digression into Gilbert & Sullivan and translation in general. More background: "Do you think Gorey is funny in Japanese?" "Shiranai. (I don't know.)"

Behold the adorable octowreath (via). The monster kit in the header isn't bad, either. But -- and octowreath! for the door! wa!

---L.