sj, Plei recommended Sula or Honeybee Gardens.

Thanks!

Is the guy in Elmo's World called Mr. Noodle?

Yes! I love Mr. Noodle.

How often has the Chenoweth been on as Miss Noodle? Was it only once?

Google's logo is animated today (you have to give it about 10 seconds).

How often has the Chenoweth been on as Miss Noodle? Was it only once?

She did two, I think.

Amy, thanks for the rec.

We found out more about Leif's future plans this weekend. When asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, he answered, "Be a professional soccer player." Asked what he wanted to do if he couldn't be a professional soccer player, he answered, "Be a professional golfer." When asked what he wanted to do if that didn't work out, "Be a professional baseball player." Then he was asked what he wanted to do if playing a sport professionally wasn't an option, "Let my wife work."

I find Mr Noodle unbearably creepy. Something about a grown man who apparently does nothing but hang around outside a 4 year-old's bedroom window all day...

Tongue twisters

In search of the world’s hardest language

...

Berik, a language of New Guinea, also requires words to encode information that no English speaker considers. Verbs have endings, often obligatory, that tell what time of day something happened; telbener means “[he] drinks in the evening”. Where verbs take objects, an ending will tell their size: kitobana means “gives three large objects to a man in the sunlight.” Some verb-endings even say where the action of the verb takes place relative to the speaker: gwerantena means “to place a large object in a low place nearby”. Chindali, a Bantu language, has a similar feature. One cannot say simply that something happened; the verb ending shows whether it happened just now, earlier today, yesterday or before yesterday. The future tense works in the same way.

...

With all that in mind, which is the hardest language? On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” Like Kwaio, it has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

Using donuts to explain cell mitosis: [link]