And what’s a blog without the occasional cat post?
What’s this about a new camera, you ask? Well, little did I know as I was lurking about the American Museum of Natural History and experiencing serious camera inadequacy, J had a little Squidmas surprise brewing. A gorgeous new digital camera! It’s a Sony Cybershot DSC-T2 and it’s packed with weird features that may or may not fall into the category of “useful,” like a smile sensor, face detector and “beach” setting. Really, though, the camera is great. It’s got 8.1 megapixels, a seriously long-lasting battery, shoots video in full HD and has a 4 GB internal memory, which means I don’t have to ever worry about filling my memory card. And the best part is the size; it fits easily into my coat pocket so I can carry it everywhere, unlike my last camera, which fit easily into a backpack and was quite cumbersome. I still wouldn’t let my new little toy get into a bare fist fight with Brian’s, but I couldn’t be happier with it.
J's Squidmas wrapping paper.
I got some other nice things for Squidmas as well, all quite nerdy but quite useful, such as the Planet Earth series on DVD, a TI-83 calculator and a tee-shirt featuring Tuojiangosaurus. The tee shirt was a perfect gift, given my history with the dinosaur. *story below
Anyway, today I decided that I just needed more stuff and I took a little trip to Borders and bought myself the following:
· Mozart’s Requiem
· Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World
· Stephen Jay Gould’s Ever Since Darwin
· Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion
I’ve spent a large portion of the day listening to the Mozart album and reading Not in Our Classrooms, which is a collection of essays on Intelligent Design and why it’s not appropriate for our nation’s schools. I’m hoping to finish it soon so I can move on to the books I bought today.
*When J and I went to the Miami Science Museum, I took a lot of pictures of fossils with accompanying voice recordings, so I could correctly label the pictures at home. When it came time to pronounce Tuojiangosaurus’s name, I had a hard time. When I put the pictures on my computer, the voice recordings got saved into Windows Media Player. One night, during dinner with J and a few friends, my voice came on, loud and clear, saying “Tu…Two…Two…Tuo-jango…” It was embarrassing. In a hunt to find me a nice dino shirt, J happened upon Tuojiangosaurus and now I’m forced to pronounce it every time someone looks at the shirt and asks, “How do you say that.” What a clever gift. Ha ha ha. Really, though…it was quite funny.
5 comments:
I've always hated that name, too. So it's "TWO-JANG-o-SORE-us?" Or is the "JANG" pronounced "YANG?"
I still don't really know...I just sorta mutter the first part under my breath and then say "saurus" really loud :)
I've always hated that name, too. So it's "TWO-JANG-o-SORE-us?" Or is the "JANG" pronounced "YANG?"
My understanding of Chinese is far from perfect, and Chinese isn't the easiest language to spell out phonetically (they have some sounds that aren't usual in the West), but my understanding is that it's something like this:
twoh-ZHEEAHNG-oh-saw-rus.
That first syllable is like saying "two oh" really fast (as one syllable). Dunno if that helps...
Hmmm...I should ask my parents about that, my mom and dad being fluent in cantonese & mandarin. By the way, great musical choice: Mozart's Requiem ROCKS, though it's debatable how much of it he composed; but I digress. May I also recommend Brahms Ein Deutches (sp?) Requiem (German Requiem), which rocks just as much. Oh, and Happy New Year!
Thanks for the pronunciation help...I've been saying "Twuo-jang-o-saurus," but I believe Jerry is right about the "zh" sound.
I have some more time to learn, anyway, as it's too darn cold to wear just a tee shirt ('cept for in my own home).
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