Swans on Tea

Apparently “Swan flu” is a common search term, supposedly a mistake by people researching swine flu, but I think we know what’s really going on.
You don’t have the flu. You’re just hot for this blog.

[finger, prick] ≠ 0
( … lots of George Carlin on HBO lately … )

Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News
It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.
[…]
Among those articles were gems [...]

Bally Jerry pranged his kite right in the how’s your father. Hairy blighter, dicky-birdied, feathered back on his Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper’s and caught his can in the Bertie.
Oh, wait. Bacon in the Asteroid Belt is meant to be taken literally. Answering the timeless question of how [...]

and the foolish consistency they represent.
Flying Flux: The Dullness of Details
I think it behooves writers to make technical documentation fun by embedding a few surprises here and there for the unsuspecting reader. Just like how chip designers used to embed artwork in their chips (I’ve done so myself), writers of technical documents should try [...]

We’re rearranging the lab, and clearing out some old equipment, including taking down part of the original Cesium Fountain laser layout (which uses a lot of optical table space). A colleague was moving a rack, and wanted to know where it should go. I suggested next to a hard place, but leaving a [...]

Primary Proverbs
A Primary School teacher had twenty-six children in her class. She presented each child in her classroom the 1st half of a well-known proverb and asked them to come up with the remainder of the proverb. It’s hard to believe these were actually done by Primary School children. Their insight may surprise you.
(There’s also [...]

It’s Talk Like a Physicist Day!
I gave a rather extended vocabulary list last year, and used a lot of those terms. A few more that I’ve used in the last year:
I mentioned a quantum, to mean a small amount, as in “take that with a quantum of salt”
I used “collapse the wave function” to [...]

Nah, These Won’t Traumatize the Kids at ALL
“Yay! Dead elephants!”
There’s also When Common Sense Isn’t, where the decorator has copied, rather than followed, the written instructions.
We Love Freymoto
put Heart in Place of Word Love
All at Cake Wrecks
A Cake Wreck is any cake that is unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate - you name it. A Wreck [...]

Probably NSFW
You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
Complete transcript
Has this ever happened to you?
You work very horde on a paper for English clash
And then get a very glow raid (like a D or even a D=)
and all because you are the word¹s liverwurst spoiler.
Proofreading your peppers is a matter of [...]

Useful little phrase translation site (but no phrase rotation), in this case “I do not like green eggs and ham” into German.
Interesting, or perhaps disturbing, that “I do not want to die alone” is considered a related phrase.
h/t to Caroline

Blogs That Should Exist
Where was this a year ago, when all I could think of was last-name-phonetic-translation-of-first-initial?