tends to kill people who try to climb it

Which seems only fair.

PBS special by Michael Wood

My secret boyfriend.

Yay fluevogs and thrift gods!

I bought so much stuff at the thrift store yesterday. Tried to start Marie Kondo-ing my stuff, but "useful" and "sparks joy" have very little relation to each other.

Then went to see "Diary of a Teenage Girl" with a friend. It was weird. Interesting setting but good lord awkward. Now I'm trying to convince myself to go work out. I got dressed. That's step one. Now to get to the gym...

The Yangtze River is actually known as Chang Jiang in China, which means literally "Long River". Beijing is the literal translation of "Northern Capital"; Shanghai mean "On-the-Sea". And all their months translate as "Month 3" or such like. One might be grateful Everest was named by Tibetans.

This cracks me up. I knew about the Yangtze and Beijing, but didn't quite grok the whole trend towards highly literal naming conventions. Oh the mysterious Orient!

I spent about 4 hours today working on the grant I'm writing. My brain is fried like a piece of toast. Egad. But other than that, very productive! And I came home to wine, so there's that.

Apparently all Denali means is "tall." Which, points for succinctness, but I like my mountain names to have a bit more cosmic resonance.

Denali means, in full, "the great one" (the rest of the local Native Alaskan names for the mountain translate to either "the tall one" or "the high one" - Athabascan/Dene names tend to be very matter-of-fact). To be fair, there are a shedload of mountains around that area, especially from the northern side (which is where the people live that we got the name Denali from).

I'm just waiting for the inevitable bitching and moaning about Obama changing the name to some Kenyan/Islamic word from people who are completely ignorant of Alaska's push to recognize the indigenous people's name.

Lung~ma seems apt for Everest.

I'm not very creative, so I kind of don't understand how anything gets anything other than the most obvious name! "Which mountain?" "You know, the tall one?"

I'm like that too. I have had a cat named Mr. Kitty (who I nicknamed Bunny) , a cat named Mr. Bunny (who I nicknamed BooBoo , and a cat named Miss Bobo (who has no nickname, so I am not sure what my next cat will be called).

I am at work! I am trying to come in at 7 and leave at 3:30 because of buses, but we will see how that goes. I have to get up at 4:30 - 5:00 to make that happen. The weird thing is that since I am one of the first ones here, it actually took forever to get to my desk. I had to fill ice cube trays because I took the last ice, and I had to make coffee.

Half Dome, the Grand Canyon, the Great Lakes, Salt Lake - American landmarks have their share of literal names. And if Chinese Month 3 is actually the third month instead of September being the 9th month I can't criticize that system.

I hear you Sophia. One of the things I like about getting to the office early is there isn't anyone paying attention to exactly when I get there (there are other people there earlier, but they don't sit near me not know my schedule and there's room in the fridge for my lunch. OTOH, my lunch gets shoved to the back and hidden behind the lunches of everyone who comes in after me...of course, here the buses don't run early enough to get me to work by 7, but now that I have a Clipper card I can experiment with taking the bus home, at least, without worrying about carrying exact change.

I am pleased that the toaster oven pizza crisper I impulse bought for myself has turned out to be exactly the right size for reheating waffles. Serendipity!

Someday I will explore what this means for pizza in the waffle iron. Someday.