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Coming soon: Sugar House Scrumpy
Judging by the stuff I swallowed by accident during the siphoning, it’s going to be very sweet, and potentially explosive if the Grolsch bottles go before the pop caps… Am storing it in a cupboard for a week before it’s going anywhere near a fridge.
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.
Flying dog loop
Dinner party an unparallelled (sp?) success.
I ended up making shepherd’s pie based on an old family recipe I found on the world wide wibbly web, with a few adaptations. During my research I found out that I was actually cooking cottage pie, since shepherd’s pie is made with minced lamb not beef. You live and learn. Anyroad, it was well nice and I got to use the Salsa tipo inglesa I blogged about a few weeks ago. And it goes pretty well with tequila, who’d’ve thunk it?
It wasn’t all put together as last minute(ly) as I’d feared because Sita’s first Tequila class only lasted 2 hours, not 4. It was just introductions from the 15 or so people there and reading a few powerpoint slides. So we had time to nip over to Waldo’s Mart (the 99 cent store across the road, well, 13 pesos including VAT) and stock up on extra forks and stuff. It looks like all the people Sita was hoping to interview for her project are coming to talk in her class. Saturday classes run from 10 to 2, there’s no way I could have hacked that yesterday. Sita is made of stronger stuff, it appears.
Next Saturday it’s a field trip to the town of Tequila where there’s a festival of some description going on, I might have to come along for that one. On Friday night we’re going to a Thanksgiving dinner with some teachers from the American school, which’ll be a laugh. Tuesday evening another mate of mine’s coming over for tea and bickies. So the social scene is picking up nicely. The employment scene is also starting up gradually. Jose’s got a few leads, and there’s another gringo graphic designer in the area whom I might be meeting next Friday. Voluntary work appears to be easy enough, though. Sita’s off to staff a creche for the women’s rights organisation today in the town centre. And I’m expecting translation work from the Gwod Metropolitan Park people any minute.
AgaveWeb.com is crawling along, I’m a bit stuck for what to do with the site and need more inspiration. I was playing with rounded corners, first using CSS, then giving in and going back to the dark age of tables. I’ll work something out… Jed themed maybe? A lengthy flash animation of a black tail in bracken, then Jed jumps out, frisbee in mouth into a puddle. The muddy water splashes the camera and a menu pops up with options…. No that has nothing to do with Agaves. I’m open to suggestions…
We planned to see Harry Potter yesterday but Sita was too knackered after a late night and academic stuff, so we watched War of the Worlds on DVD instead. Maybe today… keep your eyes on the “Media Box” on the right for my two cents. Harry III was my first review for this website… June ‘04 seems like a while ago. Well, it was…
and finally, here’s a video currently doing the rounds on the interweb of GTA playing grandma. More non-sequitur-riddled-posts coming soon…
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Reminds me of my Cambridge High School days with him in the early 60s…