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You Are In Demand If You Can Draw (Cartoon SNAP!)

I got 100%. Just so you know.

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Star Wars Sound Effects Quiz!

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The wife and I were fortunate enough to land a babysitter and get over to this show. And it was very good.

MPR currently has the entire show streaming over on their site if you’d like to see it.

Hodgman was the featured guest, but there was a guest appearance by Neil Gaiman and the lead singer of OK GO who was present to promote a show he was doing later in the weekend.

Minnesota Public Radio Presents Wits™, a four part series at The Fitzgerald Theater. The series is hosted by American Public Media radio host, McSweeney’s contributor, author and humorist John Moe. Moe and his guests will weave (and unravel) conversations around topics as wide-ranging as hard work, chickens, parenting and distraction. Wits’ will feature phone calls from special guests, musical guests on stage, and include readings — poems, passages, quotes — of works by our favorite clever dead guys, and some living ones, too.

We also got an awesome parking spot right outside the theater, thanks to the meters not being enforced after 6pm.

But I still fretted about getting towed because the meter was one of those special yellow-painted ones.

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Wits

John Hodgman

Neil Gaiman

Seven cool-sounding, super science-fictiony projects from Japanese construction company Shimizu Corporation.

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Shimizu’s Dream

Via Pink Tentacle

It ain’t easy being cheesy. Mr. Cheetah first made this sage observation back in the ’80s, and it certainly still applies to the manufacture of his favorite bright-orange snack. Turning a hunk of cornmeal into a knobby Cheeto may take only a few minutes, but it requires a fine-tuned industrial dance that leaves no room for error. Frito-Lay’s quality-control folks will not tolerate anything less than maximum crunchiness.

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Making Cheetos: It Ain’t Easy Being Cheesy

In skimming the “A”s, I’ve already found several new words to describe myself and my most common activities!

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Unusual Words

Semi-Literate Former Gold Prospector Given Own Cable News Show

I love Instapaper.

And InstaReader makes both of them even more awesome and convenient.

What’s InstaReader?

InstaReader is a free service that sends anything you star in Google Reader to Instapaper.

You don’t even have to give InstaReader your Google sign-in if you make your GReader Starred Items public.

Terrific.

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InstaReader

Instapaper

Google Reader

David J. Peterson, an expert language creator from the Language Creation Society (LCS), has been chosen to create the Dothraki language for HBO’s upcoming fantasy series GAME OF THRONES, based on the book series “A Song of Ice and Fire,” by George R.R. Martin.

Peterson drew inspiration from George R.R. Martin’s description of the language, as well as from such languages as Russian, Turkish, Estonian, Inuktitut and Swahili. However, the Dothraki language is no mere hodgepodge, babble or pidgin. It has its own unique sound, extensive vocabulary of more than 1,800 words and complex grammatical structure.

“In designing Dothraki, I wanted to remain as faithful as possible to the extant material in George R.R. Martin’s series,” says Peterson. “Though there isn’t a lot of data, there is evidence of a dominant word order [subject-verb-object], of adjectives appearing after nouns, and of the lack of a copula [‘to be']. I’ve remained faithful to these elements, creating a sound aesthetic that will be familiar to readers, while giving the language depth and authenticity. My fondest desire is for fans of the series to look at a word from the Dothraki language and be unable to tell if it came from the books or from me — and for viewers not even to realize it’s a constructed language.”

Love it.

Now just release the 5th book and all will be well.

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Today in Fictional-Language News: HBO Speaks Dothraki