Bear Consumes Man at Beer Festival

A 23 year old Serbian man was found half-eaten in a bear cage at the Belgrade Zoo during the beer festival. The zoo director said "There's a good chance he was drunk or drugged. Only an idiot would jump into the bear cage." Check out CNN (here) for the rest of the article.

xkcd

Edison had a better solution than Westinghouse?

In the July 26, 2007 edition of The Economist is an article about alternatively fueled power plants. Wind power apparently is better suited to a DC power grid, rather than the current AC grid. In the late 19th century, the battle between Edison's direct current power lines and Westinghouse's alternating current lines. 

DC lines send electrons flying from the negative terminal to the positive terminal (thank Benjamin Franklin for this somewhat backwards intuition).  AC essentially flips the terminals back and forth, so electrons flow back and forth--this is where the 120Hz comes into play.  Westinghouse's AC lines won over Edison, because it was considered easier to transfer power over longer distances via AC.  However, the article in The Economist mentions that DC lines actually outperform AC lines in terms of how far power may be transfer.  In addition, the lines may be placed closer to the ground without power degradation.  It would interesting to see if DC lines actually replace the well-established AC lines in the coming years.

For all intensive purposes, your competitious behavior need not be so dramastic!

Three phrases/words that I have heard out of place in the last year: "for all intensive purposes," "competitious," and "dramastic."

The first, "for all intensive purposes," is supposed to be "for all intents and purposes." It's highly likely that people who say the wrong phrase have never actually read this phrase in a reliable text. The incorrect usage is at some level a consequence of someone else having either poor pronunciation skills or maybe listening skills. Nevertheless, this should not permit the propagation of a phrase that means nothing: "for all intensive purposes." What the hell is an "intensive purpose"? I mean, I know some purposes can be pretty intense, but c'mon!

Next on the list is "competitious." A friend of mine said this girl, on their first and last date, told him he was "too competitious." What?! Here's more bad news: if you search "competitous" on Google you find over 49,000 results!!! That means people are using this word. According to UrbanDictionary.com, "competitious" is a synonym for "competitive." The English language contains enough redundancy with numerous alternatives to many words. Why add more alternatives to such a complex language? Even worse, it seems that the uneducated people are the ones offering more words to a language they clearly do not understand.

Finally, we have "dramastic." My sister-in-law heard this from an Ulta cashier. Perhaps she uses shampoo that penetrates her soft skull. Once again, this word appears on UrbanDictionary.com as a blend of "drama" and "drastic." Now, we're adding words to compress the language. This tendency is probably a little more acceptable among scholars. However, "drastic drama" or the reverse does not really make much sense, so I doubt scholars would let this neologism continue without complaint. Interestingly, a new track by the Beastie Boys is called "Dramastically Different." That's the adverb form of "dramastic."

What should we take from this? Stop adding words to the English language! Just because Merriam-Webster shows no listing for some new phrase, that does not mean it will not show up. Continued usage increases the meaning of this word, and then we must add it to the dictionary. That way at least the rest of us will not be left in the dark, too! The other alternative is to make the dictionary required reading in grade school, but that will never happen.

If you're interested in common English error, take a look at Common Errors in English.

Funny or Die

If you haven't been to the website Funny or Die, then you have been missing out of some funny stuff. Will Ferrell has posted a few videos himself that include Andy McKay's (co-founder of Funny or Die) daughter, Pearl. Pearl debuted in "The Landlord"short film, and appeared again in "Good Cop, Bad Cop." Another film by Ferrell is "Third Date with Will Ferrell." Be sure to watch the out takes from "The Landlord" short film. The out takes might be funnier than the original, since Pearl is quite uncooperative. There is another film with Will Ferrell that was posted just a few days ago called "Will Ferrell is USC strength coach Chuck Berry." It's a little different, not exactly as funny as the other films.

Below is another video ranked high in terms of the number of viewers by Jamie Kennedy and Stu Stone.