If the Eskimos have 100 words for snow...

...Kentuckians surely must have just as many for snow on your car. My favorite type is the snowdrift that buries the car when it is so cold that brushing all the snow away leaves the windows clear. One of my less favorite types is the one I had this morning: the frozen dew as a foil-thin layer of ice on all the windows. If you are not already late for work, you can sit in the car and just let the defrost take care of it. If you are in a hurry however and choose to scrape, it generates a fine spray of snow at your face and down your shirt, regardless of the direction of the scrape or your position relative to the car. I noticed that some of my fellow drivers chose a third option: believing that the ice was transparent enough to use as a window and leaving it there for the drive to work. (!)

The first line of this post is an example of one of my favorite linguistic devices: a snowclone. It is a familiar phrase in which some words may be replaced to form a new similar phrase. The most general form can be written with variables in place of what you can reasonably replace. A few examples:

• If the Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have M words for Y. (the snowclone after which they are named)
  
• Sometimes a X is just a X. (Did Freud actually ever say that about the cigar?)
• What happens in X stays in X. (Vegas? The Mile?)
  
• My degree in X is pending. (Mary uses this one and it always makes me laugh!)
  

I like keeping an eye out for these, and learn about new ones from the Snowclones Database blog, which I watch with an RSS feed. Do let me know if you notice others!

Blogs and Bloglines

I just set up a Bloglines account and added a few feeds to it without much problem. My favorites are blogs written by my friends, and a few web-comics: xkcd in particular seems to read my mind many days. I have also added a few blogs of professional interest such as the File Formats blog.

Bloglines appears somewhat useful, though I probably won't continue using it unless amazing features surface. Its main strength seems to be "blog discovery": helping you find the top 1000 blogs, blogs on certain subjects, etc. Unfortunately I'm mostly interested in known blogs at the moment, so am happy with my existing solution to keeping track of all these new blogs: adding them to the News & Blogs section in Thunderbird (the mail client I use, brought to us by the creators of Firefox). Apparently Outlook 2007 also allows you to keep track of RSS feeds.

The first service I blogged on was LiveJournal. LiveJournal is very friend- and community-oriented, so encourages you to gather a list of personal blogs and communities. Once you have done this it offers you a "friends" view which merges several blogs and shows you the posts in date-order. Blogger does not seem to have a concept of friend-blogs, and Bloglines does not seem to have a feature to mix feeds, so for now I'm seeing how well I like the "list of feeds with periodic polling and bolding of feeds with new entries" view which I get with both Thunderbird and Bloglines. So far Thunderbird is winning, since I already have it open for my mail and it takes fewer clicks for me view any given feed. I tend to skim new entries quickly and go back to read them in more detail later, and that second step seems to require a button click to show me all entries that aren't "new". I suspect the real solution will be when my husband writes me an XSLT feed mixer. I like when he makes me presents. :D

Another thing I miss about LiveJournal is threaded comments: the ability to respond to a particular comment on a blog post. In Blogger, you can only add another comment to the big laundry list of comments already there, and it may appear nowhere near what you are responding to. Somebody responded to one of my comments on somebody else's blog and I only saw it because I happened to go back to the blog to look. (Note: comments do not show up in the main RSS feed for a blog!) I could have chosen to get email whenever anybody else left a comment to the blog post, but they may not have been relevant. Right now I'm fine with reading everything, but that is likely not going to scale with time.