I spent the last couple of days on the road, and this is what I came across.

It is a well-known fact that the same place names show up over and over in the United States, and that some famous (and not so famous) European place names made it into the deepest countryside. Missouri seems to be especially blessed, and when I first moved here and saw headlines on the cover page of our local newspaper such as “Drive-by Shooting in Mexico” I was momentarily disoriented until I found out that the city of Mexico was not very far from where I lived.

So it is with the same sense of wonder that I can report that last week, on my way to Wisconsin, I crossed from Missouri into Illinois at Louisiana. Actually, I had lunch in Louisiana before crossing the Mississippi. Just west of town, I had a choice to turn north to Hannibal or south to Troy — I know, a choice between Carthage and Troy would have been better.

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One of the focal points of social life in Charlottesville, Virginia, is Greenberry’s at the Barracks Road shopping center. Here you sip your coffee or tea, eat chocolate croissants for breakfast, run into Dave Matthews or John Grisham, and catch up reading the newspapers — but maybe nostalgia makes it look rosier than it really was.

One thing, however, I can attest to without any reservations is the quality of their coffee. I always have been partial to their Viennese Blend, and when M. had to go to C-ville last week for a day, she brought back two pounds of genuine Greenberry’s Viennese Blend. It doesn’t get better this.

Talking of Greenberry’s: I just found it mentioned on pags 277 and 357 in the David Baldacci novel Split Second which takes place in what seems to be (an unnamed) Nelson County.

Take the quiz: “Which American City Are You?”

Seattle
Your dark exterior masks a caffeine driven activism. You’ll take up a cause and you’ll get ugly to advance it.

“The translator is literature’s great unsung hero. The labor is antlike, the pay mediocre and the only notice a small credit on an inside page and the ritual abuse of authors everywhere.” William Deresiewicz, who teaches English at Yale, reviews If This Be Treason by Gregory Rabassa in today’s NYT. Rabassa translated authors like Miguel Ángel Asturias and Gabriel García Márquez.

“Annoying Web content often overwhelms the page.” That’s where the Content Blocker comes in. A dream product for on-line advertisers. (Don’t miss The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference in the same list of spoofs.)

Ich weiß, das mit den Artikeln bei nichtdeutschen Wörtern ist so eine Sache, aber „das Log(buch)“ ist ein solides deutsches Wort. Wo ist da das Problem? Ich zitiere dann auch einfach Nicole von beissholz.de:

Ich wollte doch auch noch (nachvollziehbarerweise) anmelden: http://das-nicht-der-blog.blogspot.com/ – unterstützt!
Wer „der Blog“ sagt, schreibt auch Standart. Und der Bonbon.

Our daily newspaper is constantly dropping existing comics and adding new ones. After they had eliminated almost all the good ones, there was finally a funny addition: Brevity by Guy & Rodd. Why this is important? Because I read the funnies with my first cup of coffee of the day.

If you thought that the language professions were boring, check out this women’s experience during a job interview at the Glasgow, Scotland office of Alpha Translating and Interpreting Services (which has this thoroughly boring website). “Breach of the peace?” Couldn’t they have come up with a better charge?