I’ve got a lovely bunch of glasses
Thrill to the 84 frames of, frankly, very similar looking glasses… HERE
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Learning Spanish makes you less neurotic?
From The Telegraph of all places… who manage to dumb down scientific research to a point where it makes almost no sense then fail to provide a link to the original paper… :
A second language ‘changes personality’
By Robert Matthews (Filed: 03/07/2005)If only Basil Fawlty had learnt a little Spanish.
Psychologists have discovered that people take on the characteristics of foreign nationals when they switch into their language – and such a change in the embittered hotel owner could well have improved life for the hapless Manuel.
The personality changes, however, run deeper than a desire to gesticulate wildly when talking in Italian or to plunge into gloom when speaking Russian. According to research, using different languages alters basic characteristics traits such as extroversion and neuroticism.
Researchers at the University of Texas made the discovery while studying the personality traits of bilingual English and Spanish speakers in the United States and Mexico. They began by establishing the attributes of native speakers, using the results of personality tests on almost 170,000 people.
The results showed that English-speaking Americans are typically more conscientious, agreeable and outgoing than native Mexicans, but also less neurotic.
I always feel more extraverted and less neurotic when I’m in Spanish speaking mode, happily talking to strangers, smiling and all that. But the second bit of the article makes no sense to me. Does racial profiling via 170,000 personality tests make it OK? And how the chingada do you measure “agreeability” and “conscienciousness”? Are they including undocumented immigrants in the test, I’d feel less outgoing too if I thought I was in constant danger of being deported and the government of the county I lived in was hell bent on building a 4.5 metre wall along its border with my home country with funds left over after waging a ill-thought-out and illegal war on abstract nouns and then legalising torture round the world… And then there’s the socioeconomic aspects of the respective countries…
Meanwhile, somewhere in Torquay:
Basil Fawlty: Manuel…
[Basil thwacks him on the forehead with a spoon]
Basil Fawlty: …You’re a waste of space.
Santa Teresita, where the market down the road is
Click the picture for bigger, it’s a composite of 26 photos I took on Sunday standing in the market by la Iglesia Santa Teresita. Browse around on Flickr and you’ll also find pictures from La Barranca, the huge canyon where Guadalajara suddenly comes to a grinding halt. It’s also where the UdeG school of architecture is, so on weekdays the park is full of furtive young couples carrying their blueprints around in cardboard tubes. Lovely.
Going Coastal
Similar pictures to a fortnight ago, except now there’s a few poppies out. Still featuring the patented Atticus-shakycam-action.
Many a mickle
The latest on the move:
Not sure whether we can do the trip up North- funds and other stuff are making things tricky. We had planned to head up on Thursday. May not happen after all…
Atticus is staying with his grandparents who are reluctant to let him go. Which frankly beggars belief. Sally & I installed a “Doggy Door” in the garage so he now has free range with Martin’s tools and HAM radio.
The latest on consumption of media:
First off- Serenity is the best Sci-Fi film evah. I’m fixin’ to do a fully-fledged review. But in the meantime, see it.
Am nearing the end of Pratchett’s latest paperback- Going Postal, and is something of a return to form for him. Thoroughly enjoyable.
The latest on boring tech stuff (seriously, skip this):
I was more than happy to get my PDA working again and even had a 1GB SD card full of episodes of QI on it which I’d started to watch. I was starting to remember my American dictionary two-letter Scrabble word s better too. Anyroad, the screen suddenly went blank, the controls sluggish, next thing I knew it was powering off and refusing to come back to life. It’s going back to Texas today hopefully for a replacement and not another sub-par repair. If it happens again I’m going to angle for a new Treo.
Sally’s laptop- the saga continues. First off, it wasn’t connecting to the interweb and wouldn’t let me reinstall ME to fix it. Its internal floppy and CD-ROM don’t work, but i have an external CD-ROM so I managed to install XP on it. Then I partitioned off another section to install ME back on it, planning to remove the XP part later.., it rebooted with the (blank) ME partition in DOS, and now i can’t do nowt ‘cos it can’t use the USB CDROM nor the internal, nor the floppy. It’s now in pieces on the table and I’m going to take it to Downey Computer Repairs to see if they can fish the (impossible to find) hard drive out of it then give me a 44-40 pin adapter to install ME on it with my desktop. It’s frustrating stuff.
Sorry ’bout all that. Still aiming to get round to emails but there’s tons to do (and more webdesignery in the offing- I’m learning about Online Shopping Carts…) and until our plans coalesce there’s nowt much to say. Hang on in there, and in the absence of postings on this blog, have a gander’s at James Shaw’s blog which is extremely well written when it’s not about sport, which is, however you dress it, sport.
Also, coming soon to these pages: Anecdotes. I don’t have nearly enough anecdotes and need to work on some. It’s not enough to travel the world and come back with pretty photos and a blanket description of yer travels. So I’m going to work on some tales. This is partially inspired by Adam and Joe’s XFM radio show and the incredible oral history tradition that runs through the Cambell family.