(Hat-tip: LW.)

(N.B. I am back from the road trip, the last several days of which were spent without Internet. I’m going through all the photos and will post them, as well as individual entries for each day of the trip, as soon as I’m able. Hopefully later today.)

After Fredericton, we turned north and went through Edmundston, New Brunswick into Québec, where we made a small detour to the town of Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!. Yes, Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! is a real place, but you don’t have to take my word for it—check out its entry on Wikipedia. Apparently nobody really knows where the name comes from—it’s probably just as well. At any rate, I have photographic evidence proving that (a) it exists and (b) I’ve been there. Count another notch on my list of places with crazy names that I’ve been to.

We camped right near Québec City and went into town for the 400th birthday of the city, which was celebrated in a torrential downpour with church bells ringing simultaneously all across Canada at 11 am (eastern time, natch). Thousands of people turned out despite the rain, but we west-coasters were the only ones sans umbrellas, nyah nyah. There were boring speeches by dignitaries and a military parade that almost didn’t happen because of the rain. Of course, the anti-war protesters came out in force anyway and the Québec City police were ready to meet them face-on, as it were, in full riot gear with gas masks. I did not think it wise to try to snap photos of some of these events.

So, bonne fête, Québec ! To 120, or something like that.

As always, the full photo gallery is available here. Next stop, Montréal!

Yankees Lose Wang in Rout of Astros

I know it’s the family name of Wang Chien-Ming, but don’t you think the headline editors could have phrased this unfortunate incident in a slightly better manner? I mean, the guy injured his foot, but the headline still reads like…well, I think you can figure it out.

And what is Wang’s reaction?

“I feel sore,” Wang said in a statement to the Yankees’ media relations director, Jason Zillo. “The doctor says I have to go to get an M.R.I. tomorrow. Of course I’m disappointed.”

(My mother pointed this one out to me. Thanks, Mom! Here’s your tip of the, er, baseball cap.)

[Sculptor Adam] Reeder explains: “In mythology Pan played his flute and danced in the woods. In my sculpture, the flute is replaced with an iPod. The nature of Pan hasn’t changed, but the context in which he is seen has changed. The technology has changed what Pan is doing.”

Adam’s masters thesis through The San Francisco Academy of Art University is based on a series of sculptures where mythological or classical figures are used to represent Western culture and are combined with modern technological objects to illustrate how technology has changed the way people interact.

The best part: one of these meisterwerks will set you back a mere $9800.

Other names of this sort are Arpachshad (a small but delicious fish occasionally placed on pizza?), Asenath (whose name has the misfortune to be pronounced Osnat in Modern Hebrew; sounds like an Egyptian with post-nasal issues), Malchizedek (which is perfectly acceptable in Hebrew but is often pronounced weirdly in English, as something like mal-cheese-edek), and everyone’s perennial favourite, Habakkuk.

Can you think of any others? What are your favourite funny-sounding Biblical names?

Barring outfit changes, no more Don Cherry posts today. Back to regular blogging soon.

—John Cleese, as Humphrey Williams in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

qÁq‘tā’amas — game with wooden ball

Formed from q‘tá’abas, “wooden ball covered with spruce-roots.” There were two sides in the game, with the same number on each. Each side had a goal consisting of a little pit, which was guarded by one man. All but the two guards gathered in the centre. One man threw up the ball and everyone tried to catch it, run with it to the goal of the opponents, and put it into the pit. Those of the other side tried to take the ball away from the one that had it. The side that first made ten goals won the game. After four goals had been made, the game was suspended for a while and a general free-for-all fight took place.

I swear, it’s basically hockey: goals, goaltenders, and free-for-all fighting. Nothing changes.

Hat-tip: Alexa

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, says that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

In an interview published Tuesday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes says that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures.

The interview was headlined “The extraterrestrial is my brother.” Funes said that ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom.

What a relief. And here I thought that admitting the existence of aliens would be an admission that the human race was not the most important thing in creation. Not sure about this whole “brother” thing, though…

I’ll post a link to the interview once it comes through in English; here it is in Italian.

• Reuters: Sexy orchids do more than embarrass wasps?
• BBC News: Microwaves ‘cook ballast aliens’ (This one’s actually an interesting news story; brought me back to SimCity 2000. But whoever ‘writes headlines’ at the BBC ‘needs’ to ‘get help’. And ’stop using’ so many ‘damn’ quotation ‘marks’.)
• BBC News: Frigid robot eyes top tech prize
• BBC News: Life for wife murder over dog row
• BBC News: Boys sentenced over Goth murder (I think they meant murder of goth.)
• BBC News: Ronaldo in transvestite scandal (He wasn’t the one in the dress, but you’d never suspect it from the headline.)
• BBC News: Right bra ‘could halt breast ops’ (Are those anything like black ops? brown ops? the occasional beige ops?)

And of course, I noted this earlier, but can’t resist bringing it round once more:

• BBC News: Great tits cope well with warming

Link to download the QuickTime .mov of the amusing incident is here (3 MB).

Great tits cope well with warming

It’s about birds (tits, like ‘tit-willow‘), of course, but who in this day and age is going to read it that way?

Hat-tip: Dan Savage