herring

the big występ

The venue:
The star (I rotated her, but she just rotated right back; I repeated the rotation, but the photo remains stubbornly horizontal):The other stars (and the same technical problem, plus some blurring - oh, and it was artfully cropped too, but no longer):The verruca, I mean, the farruca (both rotated & cropped!):
The guajira (aka the one with the fans):The allegrias:
Shawls aloft (Em wasn't in this one):
The finale (never have so many Polish women - and one man - danced the sevillanas en masse):

dinosaur

I was excited to find out just now that the original line-up of Dinosaur Jr have made a new record (it'll be out in May).
So excited that I wanted to put
something celebratory up here. It wasn't easy - what with me being so fussy and all - finding a suitable picture. An image search for J Mascis and friends yields lots of hair, childlike scrawl, all manner of vaguely gothic stuff and guitar amps. And the young girl hitching up her slacks, cigarette in mouth, on the cover of Green Mind. I vividly remember Mark Lamarr saying that Freak Scene was his favourite record when he had a late-night show on the old Radio 5. You can hear it on their myspace page & it still sounds really good. The photo here is from the BBC website's Keeping It Peel pages, which look like a generous slice of anorak paradise. ("The top 125 Peel Sessions of all time have been selected by the people who knew John best - his family, friends, studio engineers, producers and musicians, and we've provided snippets of audio from each to ensure you get the best round-up of what made the Peel Sessions truly unique." Pity it's just snippets.)

what are the other ones, Graeme?

Graeme Diamond, principal editor of the OED, in today's Independent: "Wiki joins a small but distinguished group of words which are directly or ultimately borrowings into English from Hawaiian."

i feel like a moa

anonymous people with accents

This place - that's the Speech Accent Archive - is great! Well, I've only listened to a few so far, but it's been great fun.

A man from Edinburgh says something unlikely.

A Glaswegian says the same thing.

Can you guess where this guy is from? Or this one? And what are snow peas?

One last one especially for Em.

(Thanks to the archives of The Midnight Bell for pointing me this way. Does Sean know that The Slaves of Solitude is now in print?)

frangipani

This is the best site - by a country mile - that I've found for learning about Australia in French.

the Embarrasses

There is an Embarrass in Minnesota.

And another in Wisconsin.

Which do you prefer?