why can't they speak english, like god intended? (isn't that why the bible's in english?)
Today's link:
All your Ouija board questions answered!
Running news:
Ugh. I'm sick.
The Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt article from August 28 discusses what wacky Americans are putting on the web. The bit about me's at the end:
Diane Patterson has a few tips for Charles. On her homepage, she gives on-line diary authors recommendations on how to write entries worth reading. She writes her own in letter form: for example, the description of a dream of a teacher who slept with all the girls in her class, but not with her. What she dreamed on 18 July 1996, every Websurfer who heads for http://www.spies.com/~diane/diary hears about. The author knows exactly how the number of Website visitors can be increased: "An honest diary should be as wild as possible, neurotic, sexy, full of drugs."
(I assume I'll be hearing from Scott Anderson if I got it wrong.)
All I want to know is, where can I find her diary? I'm afraid I now have all these Germans feeding my journal entries into Babelfish and not finding any sex or drugs.
MöngôlO's Diary (almost) has an entry about the .net article on online journals and MöngôlO doesn't include a link. I trust that the thousands of fluent French speakers (probably Scott Anderson, again) will let me know if I've got this one right. The bit about me is:
What is amusing is that he presents the journal of a certain Diane Patterson, author of a famous page entitled Why Web Journals Suck but also the author of a journal. The author of the article says that this woman is hated by many journalers because of this page, but he presents it in reference throughout the article as if she knew more than the others. I have the impression that this guy has a funny concept of credibility.
(What makes me think there's something I don't understand here is the start of the first sentence: "Ce qui est amusant, c'est qu'ˆ un moment il prŽsente le journal d'une certaine Diane Patterson." Why does MöngôlO mention my journal...then mention my journal again at the end of the sentence as though he hadn't mentioned it up front?)
Anyhow. MöngôlO thinks that the thesis of the .net article is that there are two types of journals: the funny ones, and the ones written by people who need help. He didn't think much of the article. Or of me, clearly. Well, pfffft.
The subtitle of this entry is a joke, okay? I know the Bible was written in Aramaic and Hebrew and Greek and probably a few others that dropped off along the way.
There's an old joke my father told me about a battle going on in Canada over whether the national language should be English or French. And a pollster asks a farmer out in the middle of Saskatchewan his opinion, and the farmer immediately says, "English! The way God wants it!" The pollster asks him how he knows God wants them to speak English, and the farmer says, "If God didn't want us to speak English, why'd he write the Bible in English?"
And you can tell this joke about Canadians, because you know that Canadians aren't that stupid, and they accept good-natured teasing. Canadians are So Damn Nice. (Except Scott Anderson. Well, okay, he's supplied me with the following joke: "Do you know that there are really four downs in Canadian football, not three? We always punt on the third just to be extra cautious.")
The title of this entry comes from the time I was watching the Oscars with a friend of mine, also named Diane, and my sister. Laurence Olivier was making a presentation or accepting an honorary Oscar or something. My mother came into the room and said, "Why do they keep letting foreigners run everything around here?"
Diane immediately burst into laughter, which made my sister and I look at one another strangely.
Then we remembered: Other people can hear our mother's Irish accent, we can't. And it probably sounded pretty funny to hear this Irishwoman ranting about the foreigners.
Of course, maybe my mother just has a thing about the English. (She doesn't. I didn't even know for years that there are Irish and English who really hate one another just because of the other's nationality.)
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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com