What goes “ninu ni ni no ni no“?

Give up?

Answer: a siren in Catalan. Yup, that’s the noise that a cop car makes in certain parts of Spain. Same car, though, goes “pin pon,” if it’s in France and “wang wang wang” if it’s hurrying through the Philippines. This is onomatopoeia, folks, which lovely long Greek word means the making of words from sounds.

It’s always fascinated me that using the same aural apparatus folks can come up with such different-seeming words for the same aural stimulus. The Wikipedia article on Cross-linguistic onomatopoeias . . . [more]

In honour of the McGill Guide 7th ed I’ve decided to write this entire post without any periods For the sake of simplification I have; however, retained commas, hyphens, semi-colons and capitalization at the beginning of sentences for the sake of clarity, at least until the 8th ed is published (I will admit, though, that I had to retain the periods in my links or they would not work; I’m unsure if that can be used as metaphor) As many are aware Nova Scotia and the Maritime Provinces have a sudden and acute interest in canceled TV sitcoms this weekend . . . [more]

Most of us realize that merely deleting a file doesn’t really remove it from the hard drive or other storage media it resides on. (For some background on this issue see a post I wrote a while back.)

Given how we use digital devices today – both for work and personal use – we can’t just abandon this issue to our firm IT staff. Our personal computers at home, our phones, copiers, memory sticks and ipads all probably contain our own personal information, or personal or confidential information of others. We need to manage that not only while we use . . . [more]

One of my favourite funny memories of time spent in Germany is of a moment in the square of a small town when a chant went up from among the layabouts that decorate these public spaces: “Johnson! Johnson! Johnson! . . . ” And, lo, here came Johnson strolling from behind some building naked as a jaybird. Hausfraus — it was shopping time — turned away, moved away, and this Moses parting the bourgeois sea, not acknowledging his claque, which kept up the chant, sauntered free. But as he approached the fishmongers, where I was watching from, (with some uneasiness, . . . [more]

In a stunningly inaccurate prediction, I announced to a friend a few years back that parasols would move into the mainstream here in Canada as we worried more and more about sun damage to our skin. As you may have noticed, it didn’t happen. Perhaps it may still, awaiting only some prominent person to champion the thing, in the way that Englishman Jonas Hanway in the mid 1800s popularized the use by men of umbrellas against the rain despite the taunts and ridicule he got for using a woman’s device.

Everyone’s doing it now, of course. And umbrella makers rejoice . . . [more]

A monk asked Joshu in all seriousness: “Does a dog have Buddha-Nature or not?” Joshu retorted: “Mu!”

The problem of “identity,” as we would style it today, is the sort of thing that zen masters make their students struggle with, as in the famous dog koan set out above, which tackles the matter elliptically. “Who am I?” — “Who are you?” — are questions that human beings have been worrying since the dawn of consciousness, presumably.

Now, I’m not going to get all gnomic on you here: it’s not the place for it. But the deep question is not so . . . [more]

Back in January, the United States Supreme Court released its judgment in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 50 (2010) [PDF], a challenge by a “non-profit corporation” to §441b of the U.S. Code limiting election spending by corporations. In the words of the judgment’s syllabus (i.e. headnote):

[This] federal law prohibits corporations and unions from using their general treasury funds to make independent expenditures for speech that is an “electioneering communication” or for speech that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a candidate.

The court decided 5-4 that the law could not stand, that it was an . . . [more]

Last weekend Premier Dalton McGuinty approved mixed martial arts (MMA) fights in the Province of Ontario, after years of resisting its introduction. Ontario will be the seventh province in Canada to allow MMA fights.

One of the major obstacles has been a provision in the Criminal Code banning what is termed as “prize fights,” with a specific exception for boxing,

Engaging in prize fight
83. (1) Every one who
(a) engages as a principal in a prize fight,
(b) advises, encourages or promotes a prize fight, or
(c) is present at a prize fight as an aid, second, surgeon, umpire,

Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, was reportedly charged with rape and sexual molestation in Sweden on Saturday. He was, as the Swedish authorities put it, arrested in his absence. Naturally, conspiracy theorists were abuzz with the prospect that this was a smear campaign in retaliation for his recent publication of thousands of U.S. military memos. See, e.g., the Mashable story.

Later that same day — today — Swedish authorities announced that:

Chief prosector Eva Finné has come to the desicion that Julian Assange is not suspected of rape. Considering that, Assange is no longer arrested in his absence.

Now conspiracy . . . [more]

It is now one day short of a month till International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and in the Slaw tradition of preparing you well for upcoming challenges, today’s fillip takes us back to the days of piracy some two hundred years ago and more. Thanks to a recent online release of old books of piracy trials in the nineteenth century by the Law Library of Congress, we can brush up on what it meant to be a pirate back then.

And it’s not a pretty picture.

Take, for example, Joseph Baker, a Canadian pirate hanged in Philadelphia in . . . [more]

A British man, Haroon Zafaryab, has won a larger victory than he planned for. His battle began, as modern struggles so often do, when his car was ticketed and “clamped” — i.e. had a “boot” attached to a wheel. He had parked in a no parking zone behind a shopping mall while he went to the mosque for Ramadan services, and his car was clamped by a private towing company, as is allowed in England. These are, apparently, free to “hunt” those who have parkd wrongly on posted private land, and they charge a hefty fee to remove the clamp. . . . [more]

That’s right: not the virtuous life — though it may be that — but the virtual one. Those of you who are considering opening a virtual law office might like to go that extra furlong and emulate Kelly Sutton, who has sold pretty much everything he owned and now lives a life enhanced by not much more than a bike and a computer.

The BBC has just picked up on the Sutton saga, that began over a year ago, when, stimulated by a book on escaping the 9-5 work drag, he set himself the project of selling off his possessions, . . . [more]