Star of Potter film is not wild about Harry
says this Times article. His classmates are angry that a non-fan has been chosen to play the character of Harry Potter.
Germans and Grumpiness
Mira has some interesting thoughts on Germans today. She points to a BBC article that claims pronouncing “ä”, “ö”, “ü” makes you frown and thus grumpy. The article has some very nice photos of chancellor Schröder, his predecessor Kohl and Michael Schumacher. “Chancellor Schröder: Hard to smile with an umlaut in your name”. He he!
I didn’t even know Germans are known to be grumpy! Hmmm…
It would be interesting to find out if there are other “frowning languages” besides German… Mira talks about Austria (the German name for their country is Österreich!), Hungaria, Turkey and even France. Are they all grumpy, too? And makes learnin German you more grumpy, too? Garret, be careful! 
Oh, it seems like Garret read the article as well and didn’t agree with German = Grumpiness. 
Update: Dazu gibt es auch einen Artikel bei Spiegel Online. (via Schockwellenreiter.)
Nietzsche
Today is the 100th anniversary of Nietsche’s death.
Quotes:
“Lieber aus ganzem Holz eine Feindschaft als eine geleimte Freundschaft.”
“Is not life a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”
Nietzsche was born on October 15th, 1844 in Röcken, Saxony, Germany, and died on August 25th, 1900 in Weimar. He studied theology in Bonn (Hey, I didn’t know that!) and Leipzig.
Since I’m not much of a philosopher, I refer you to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Nietzsche. (André found this site for BookNotes yesterday.) Für deutschsprachige Leser sind viele weitere Links beim Schockwellenreiter zu finden.
Today is also Sean Connery’s (born 1930) and Leonard Bernstein’s (1918, died 1990) birthday.
Lemo
Das Foto von Nietzsche habe ich übrigens auf den Seiten des LEbendigen virtuellen Museums Online gefunden. Ein interessantes Projekt, das leider für Breitbandnetz entwickelt wurde…
Technical difficulties
Um… Now I’ve flipped the page using Radio UserLand, but posting text to the home page still doesn’t work.
Now I have to write something so I don’t have an empty home page… yeah.
andrea, radio.userland does the same thing here … also, the chat feature doesn’t work. i originally thought it was a problem isolated to my windows machine, after i upgraded to internet explorer 5.5. now i see the effect on both windows and mac.
the interesting thing is that i *can* use radio.userland to update a couple of concept sites i’ve been building at launchpoint.net. so, by default, i think it has something to do with the server we’re on.
Oh, I haven’t even tried the chat feature yet.
I’ve reported my problems on Discuss Radio UserLand. So far, noone has answered to py posting (except about the problem that RU couldn’t find a file because I had moved the folder RU was in).
while i was trying to make RU work, a user tried to start a chat with me. i ‘agreed’, but then every time i’d try to send a message, it would give me an error message.
my impression, up until seeing your post yesterday, that my problems were isolated to my local system(s), not userland. it seems i can retrieve information from my site, but just can’t save it back …
i’ll post a note in the discussion group as well later today, when i have a chance to compose it …
it seems i can retrieve information from my site, but just can’t save it back…
I have the same problem. I’m able to flip my page, and I can also get my home page in an outline. I edited it, but “Save” (= “post changes”) did not work.
I still haven’t tried anything else, though.
Andrea, there was a news item on the radio as I drove home this afternoon. Several linguists gave their opinion – which basically amounted to the fact that they thought the study by the American professor was flawed.
One linguist pointed out that the French have just as many, if not more, guttural phonemes and no-one is suggesting that the French are grumpy.
Same goes for many Scots dialects.
Besides, I’ve never thought of you as grumpy ;-)
Cheers,
Duncan
Besides, I’ve never thought of you as grumpy ;-)
Ha ha, of course that’s because I mostly speak English here on my weblog! English doesn’t have any grumpy umlauts, so speaking English makes everyone happy, even grumpy Germans and Scots!
Andrea