London

Mrs. B and I go to London tomorrow for about a week. There will be no new blog post until Tuesday, May 5. I need some culture and have planned visits to the British Museum, National Gallery, Tate Gallery and Wallace Collection, among others. The British Museum is easily worth two days or more to see the antiquities, which will complement my recent CD courses on the ancient cultures of Egypt, Sumeria, Babylon, Assyria, Greece and Rome.

I see we get to travel while the world panics on this swine flu fears. What is it about modern society that seeks to panic ? We lived through SARS, bird flu and now a reprise of swine flu. Of course precautions should be taken. But a panic ?

Beefers are slinging around preplanned shorts to try to create some more fear and bag a few dollars for their pockets.

Maybe I'll get the pullback I've been awaiting to deploy my new capital.

Word of the Day

"Enclitic" - adjective & noun [$10] Grammatical, from by language studies
Enclititc means (adjective, of a word) pronounced with so little emphasis that it forms part of the preceeding word; (noun) such a word, as the 'not' in 'cannot'.
Sentence: Grammatical endings in many languages arise from separate words indicating grammar becoming enclitics over long periods of time.

Le Mot du Jour

"Pagaille" - noun, feminine (variant spelling pagaïe)
Pagaille means mess, shambles; chaos. This is a polite alternative to the word in Friday's translation of FUBAR - see comments. Pagaille complète means screw-up.
La Phrase: Cette panique de grippe porscine sera une pagaille complète.
Sentence: This swine flu panic will be a screw-up.