New Year's Resolutions

So, been thinking about New Year's Resolutions...

What should I resolve? Should my resolutions be manageable or ambitious?? Should I vow just to start exercising again and lose weight in general, or should I vow to work out three times a week and lose 20 pounds??

Tell me... what New Year's Resolutions have you decided upon?? Okay, I admit it... not only am I curious, but I'm also always looking for new ideas! :-)

(Need help coming up with a New Year's Resolution? Luckily, there's even a random "New Year's Resolution Generator" that will help you decide!)

What news! Trade CDs for an iPod!!

I haven't tried this yet myself, but it sounds fab!!

"Millennium Music is offering to turn your old CDs into a brand new iPod. All you do is ship them your CDs and they'll estimate the value and send you back an iPod. The CD to iPod conversion looks like this:
45 CDs = 512 MB iPod Shuffle
65 CDs = 1 GB iPod Shuffle
85 CDs = 2 GB iPod Nano
110 CDs = 4 GB Nano
130 CDs = 30 GB iPod
175 CDs = 60 GB iPod"

(Trade CDs for an iPod - Lifehacker)

Dying Languages

An excerpt from a very interesting article from the New York Times Magazine to which I've added some hyperlinks for further information. (To see a sample of Kawesqar, check out the "Language Museum"...)

"Linguists now estimate that half of the more than 6,000 languages currently spoken in the world will become extinct by the end of this century. In reaction, there are numerous efforts to slow the die-off -- from graduate students heading into the field to compile dictionaries; to charitable foundations devoted to the cause, like the Endangered Language Fund; to transnational agencies, some with melancholic names appropriate to the task, like the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages. Chile started a modest program, not long after the ugly debates surrounding Christopher Columbus in 1992, to save Kawesqar (Ka-WES-kar) and Yaghan, the last two native languages of southern Chile. But how does one salvage an ailing language when the economic advantages of, say, Spanish are all around you...

In two generations, a healthy language -- even one with hundreds of thousands of speakers -- can collapse entirely, sometimes without anyone noticing. This process is happening everywhere. In North America, the arrival of Columbus and the Europeans who followed him whittled down the roughly 300 native languages to only about 170 in the 20th century. According to Marianne Mithun, a linguist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the recent evolution of English as a global language has taken an even greater toll. 'Only one of those 170 languages is not officially endangered today,' Mithun said. 'Greenlandic Eskimo.'

According to Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, authors of 'Vanishing Voices,' the last time human language faced such a crisis of collapse was when we invented farming, around 8000 B.C., during the switch-over from highly mobile hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture. Then the multitude of idioms developed on the run cohered into language families, like Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan and Elamo-Dravidian. The difference this time is that with each language gone, we may also lose whatever knowledge and history were locked up in its stories and myths, along with the human consciousness embedded in its grammatical structure and vocabulary.

One often hears the apocryphal story about the Inuit and their 40 words for 'snow.' True or not, it acknowledges the inherent human sense that each language, developed over a certain time and geography, is a revelation of what we call 'a sense of place.' To let languages die out, en masse, is to permit the phrase 'terra incognita' to creep back onto our environmental maps. One organization of linguists, biologists and anthropologists, known as Terralingua, is working to keep languages alive by highlighting what gets lost when they fade away...."

More from the NY Times article, Say No More
(via linkfilter)

UPDATED: For more on vanishing languages and dialects, see MMC's earlier "Dialects in Italy: A 'rosa' by any other name is a 'rusa' or a 'rodze'".

Friends and "Auld Lang Syne"

What does the song "Auld Lang Syne" mean anyway?

In 2005, I was fortunate enough to deepen my friendships with a number of "trusty fiere"!

I thought of them when I read a recent article in USA Today called "Friends in deed"... since many people that I'm fond of just happen to be guys.

And of my good "cross-gender" buddies, I'm lucky (and grateful!) to have a few wonderful close pals whose friendship has deepened this past year.

And of my few close guy friends, I'm blessed most of all to just happen to be married not only to my very, very best friend, but to the only man on earth I was clearly meant for! :-)

So, this last day of 2005, I'm truly thankful for my family who are my friends (and vice versa!), and particularly to all my favorite boys!

Many thanks again and lots of love!

Michelle

"San Marco Basilica Restoration Finally Finished"

Weird Venice: San Marco Basilica Restoration Finally Finished

"Majestic trees shine in census"

"Ancient Italian trees revered as national treasures: Italy's ancient and majestic trees make its natural treasures as worthy of protection as its cultural and artistic heritage." (more from ANSA.it - Majestic trees shine in census)

More Holiday Fun:"Pimp my Snowman"

Another "make-your-own" virtual snowman, then dude him up!



(Mine's already decked out for New Year's...)

PIMP MY SNOWMAN!

Newsflash: "Restoration of medieval manor house opens up a mystery"

Guardian Unlimited Arts news Restoration of medieval manor house opens up a mystery

Newsflash: Methuselah was *only* 120 year old!

Still, nothing to sneeze at! :-)

From today's Il Gazzettino newspaper (translation mine):

"According to Mikhail Verba, a Russian scientist from Saint Petersburg who is an enthusiast of biblical texts, Noah was only 60 years old - and not 500 - when he built the ark to excape the great flood, and Methuselah reached the age of 120 years, not the nearly 1000 attributed to him. The scholar sustains that the incorrect ages were the result of an error in interpretation by the Bible's first translators of the Sumerians' system of calculating numbers, completely different from the base-10 system used today."

The holidays continue in Venice

Carnivale 2006: "Venetian lion meets Chinese dragon"

ANSA.it - News in English - Venetian lion meets Chinese dragon

Ode to the Bellini

Not the artists, but the Venetian cocktail! (Mmm!)

Food & Dining News - Kitchen detective: Holiday cheers!

Venetian Addiction

Nan McElroy has written that Venice isn’t a dream, it's a drug. And it’s true. I realize now that I'm addicted to Venice. I experience almost a euphoria of sensory overload when I'm here, and practically a crash when I leave...

Don’t get me wrong… There’s beauty in Maine, too. But it’s a kind of beauty that’s the exact opposite of Venice… Like that of Mainers themselves, its beauty is subtle and natural, quiet and a little desolate. A nice counterpoint to a city which redefines baroque, but still it’s rather a shock to the system when I get back. Almost like peace and quiet after a rock concert… a silence so powerful that it’s nearly deafening.

I find I’m different in Venice, too. I have an immediate hankering to write prose here, to desperately try to capture these rapid-fire, fleeting sensations before they evaporate forever. But it’s a losing battle from the start. Oddly enough, though I love the city from the bottom of my heart, my husband notes that I'm quieter and seem to be sadder in Venice than elsewhere, and maybe it’s true… I’m constantly reminded of everything that’s slipping through my fingers with the interminable passage of time… everything I struggle to share before its too late, but it’s always too late.

I guess you can never step twice into the same canal… :-)

"25 Best Webcams of 2005"

EarthCam - 25 Most Interesting Webcams of 2005: Announcing the "most unique and compelling" webcams of 2005!

Music to fall asleep by...

Soporific songs - Lifehacker