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Saturday, August 20, 2005

This just in: "Pope denounces Nazism."

Hey, better late than never.
Your ultra-nerd blog of the day is Shelf Space, which basically consists of a few guys pointing out awful grammatical mistakes in everyday life.

I discovered this by Googling the phrase "vox clamans in terris and finding that every single reference indexed by Google is from the 1984 advice of John Roberts, Bush's Supreme Court nominee, against a presidential endorsement of Michael Jackson. The phrase does not appear anywhere else on the Internet, which as far as I'm concerned means Roberts invented it.

So what kind of guy not only quotes obscure Latin phrases from the Vulgate, but knows Latin well enough to actually get the quote wrong? John Roberts, that's who.

Dorkafuss! It's vox clamans in deserto, "a voice crying in the wilderness," as this dude is pretty much alone in pointing out.

Vox clamans in terris I'm pretty sure means "a voice crying on earth," which frankly doesn't make a lick of sense.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

You can't make it up: Two Czech cops are chasing a thief - not just any thief, but a thief they've been looking hard for - and then gave up the chase midway because their shift was over.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Who woulda thought:: "Other than humans, the only animals known to be susceptible to leprosy are the armadillo and mice (on their footpads)."

Monday, August 15, 2005

Can we see a picture of this woman? Isn't there a Van Halen song about this?

UPDATE: Thank you, Doug. I have to say this is a terribly strange story, especially the husband's admirable faithfulness to his wife. He caught the 14-year-old hiding in a wardrobe, the wife confessed to an affair, and yet he still dismisses the boy's allegations as "schoolboy fantasies." I don't think we're being told the whole story. And you gotta wonder what was going on between the husband and the boy's sister.
Because I'm leaving the Czech Republic for good in two weeks, people have been asking me what has changed in the nine years I've been here. OK, OK.... Actually, nobody has asked me. But if they did, I'd just show them this: