Oh, well that explains the sporks...

The Oxford English Corpus — compiled from 32,000 different sources, ranging from news to fiction to blogs, all published since 2000, representing English from all over the world and growing every year — is a mother lode of such insights.

Buffistas are in the Corpus.

At least vs got it back at the very end.

Yorkies are a sort of terrier.

Barking is behavior that they call "self-rewarding" in dog-training and very difficult to train out.

Well, if someone can recommend a way to train an eight-year-old beagle out of barking, short of electrocution, surgery or a shovel to the brain-pan, I'd love to hear it.

This is really appealing to me: It's not your mom's mini-van

With rust and wood paneling concealing the menacing turbo-power hiding under the hood, no one would expect that old Dodge Caravan to rule the drag strip

Sporting bib overalls, gnarly beard and grimy baseball cap, Paul Smith looks nothing like a champion of the thoroughly domesticated.

But he becomes their hero every time he works his stout frame behind the steering wheel of his dragster: a 1989 mini-van with rust bubbles on the fender, faux wood grain on the sides, 185,000 miles on the odometer and a turbocharged engine that rockets the van down the track at 106 m.p.h.

"A lot of dads walk up to me after a race," said Smith, 43, of Seneca in north central Illinois. "They're just shaking their heads. They can't believe it. They shake my hand and say 'thanks.'"

A husband and father of three with a trailer sales business, Smith drag-races mini-vans.

He's part of a curious corner of the auto racing subculture in which avengers of the sensible deliberately keep their mini-vans as frumpy and suburban-vanilla as possible. But menacing horsepower lurks under the hoods, and sitting in the captain's chairs are steely-eyed veterans.

tommy, that's really appealing to me, too!

Heh.

MM, I used to think debarking was a cruel procedure, until I met a rescue Papillon who'd had it done by her previous owners. She still barked (not as much because her new 'mom' was a better dog parent) but it was a much quieter 'wuff wuff' than it would have been, and best of all she was clearly not traumatized and as happy as she could be.

Something to think about.

Is it expensive? If it is expensive, can I just do it at home by crushing the dog's trachea?

I'm afraid the trachea-crushing should be left to professionals. IIRC, I think the vet knicks the vocal cords under light anaesthesia, meaning the dog gets to go home the same day.

I wonder if this technique would work on my roommate's girlfriend.

Helicopter hovering outside for the past ten minutes so close I can barely hear myself think: Dog does not even look up from the paw she's grooming.

Heh. The other night, The Boy's cat was napping sprawled out on the kitchen table, half on top of his cell phone.

(You MUST know what comes next....)

So we called his cell phone to see what the cat would do. We expected that she'd at least sit up, if not run away.

No, not this weird-ass cat. She did NOTHING except flick one ear, as if to say, "Doesn't sound like The Human is coming to answer this, so I'll just keep napping."

Even the dogs looked at each other like, "Does Cat #3 *know* that the small device is singing under its belly?" Weird freaking cat.