Twitter vs Facebook

Twitter makes me like people I've never met and Facebook makes me hate people I know in real life.

Truthful imagery via @shaylamaddox

Pronunciation Scromunciation

I spent a good deal of time in Australia once, where they refer to the material cans are made out of as 'aluminium.'

'Al-ooo-min-ee-um'. Not 'al-oom-in-um' as I was used to.

Turns out that there's a very good reason for this difference, which is explained by my current book:

The confusion over the aluminum/aluminium spelling arose because of some indecisiveness on [the discovering chemists] part. When he first isolated the element in 1808, he called it alumium. for some reason he thought better of that and changed it to aluminum four years later. Americans adopted the new term, but many British users disliked aluminum, pointing out that it disrupted the -ium pattern established by sodium, calcium, and strontium, so they added a vowel and syllable.

Facebook Wisdom

My old friend Caitlin Chapman always makes me smile. Her Facebook status today:

Caitlin Chapman wishes people would quit bitching about the new facebook layout and worry about something meaningful for once.

And a little more follow-up:

I mean seriously, the worldwide economy is in the shitter, our country is fueling (with guns AND money) a slightly-south-of-the-border war between Mexican drug cartels, and the pope is telling people in Africa not to use condoms even though over a million africans died of aids last year, and that's just the good news on the CNN front page. But apparently, all people our age have to worry about is how much they've been inconvenienced by a superficial change in the layout of an inconsequential (and free, I might add) social networking site.

She's so wonderfully correct.