Roboshark

Last night E, aged 7, got very upset - to the point of tears - over the demise of Roboshark. We had caught the second half of a documentary, narrated by that nature stalwart, Sir David Attenborough, about sharks. A lot of the footage was captured up close and personal by a mechanical shark - Roboshark - which was equipped with state-of-the-art camera gear.

The experiment was going well as far as bronzed whalers and other more innocuous species went. But Roboshark got a bit too close to a Great White, and paid the consequences. It was last seen falling to the bottom of the ocean, its little red light blinking and finally stopping, the camera screen going fuzzy and then to black. It made me think of a Dalek dying.

Anyway, it was all a bit much for my sensitive son. He knew it wasn't a real fish, but still keenly felt the loss. A pen drawing of Roboshark to take to bed with him went some way to appeasing him. Bless his sweet nature.

Rude food

The variety of the English language is a constant source of wonder to me - it's a wonder that non-native speakers are ever able to master it. Consider this sentence:

I sued a rude man who gave me food till I spewed.

OK, a pretty tasteless example, but it makes a good point. The blue words all rhyme, but what rule, if any, do they follow? How about:

queued
lewd (in US accent, not UK which has a hint of the 'w' in there)
chewed

Then how about good and hood - spelt the same way as food, but pronounced differently.

I wonder if other languages act this way, or if it's just a result of all the influences on English - Germanic, Romantic, Old English, Norse, and so on.

Newbies

Inspired by the article in today's Sunday Star Times on how easy it is to set up a blog, I thought I'd give it a go. It should have taken only 5 minutes but after my chosen name (applecart) was taken it took me a while to think of an alternative, which I see as a kiwi version of the term.

Not sure how we will use this, but we can promise this will be a 'Danish-cartoons and South-Park-free zone.