"Then there's my mouth. Real tiny when it's closed; ridiculously huge when it's open."

- This weekend, we watched My Neighbor Totoro, which at least for the moment is my new favorite movie. Some days, you just want to perform a ritual dance with two of your colleagues that involves raising and lowering umbrellas and hopping over acorns, so as to entice them to sprout. In fact: I secretly wish my life involved more ritual dances as an official-and-solemn means of signification. Perhaps my Little Cats A and B will cooperate.

- Mr. C. Doctorow pointed us, a few weeks ago, to this fantastic essay about the early web and the evolution of our popular concept of what it should look like. I personally ran across another interesting early-web artifact, which happens to have a very long URL.

“They may call it a home page, but it’s more like the gnome in somebody’s front yard than the home itself.” -- Tim "The Hammer" Berners-Lee.

- The Hawaiian locals have this wild dialect, typically referred to as Hawaiian Pidgin (although it's really more of a creole), based largely on English but with features from the native Hawaiian, Japanese, Portuguese, and a few other languages. It has perhaps one of the most kick-awesome features in a language ever -- the magnificent metasyntactic Da Kine. Sample: "Ey, I no can da kine if you no like da kine, too!" Expressive, yes?

- Speaking of interesting dialectical features: my dad has an intrusive R, sometimes -- but not always! The more British among us apparently have it much more frequently. Esther, word to your mom!