URLs du Jour

2012-10-08

  • Hampton Beach NH Good news: New Hampshire is replacing signs at the beach that attempted to advise French-speaking tourists on proper procedures for requesting assistance.

    One sign warning French speakers about rip currents was supposed to say, "If you're in trouble, wave for assistance," but instead it read, "if you need help, ocean wave."

    How hard can this be? Google Translate suggests: En cas de difficulté, hurler et crier et agiter votre butin. Is that wrong?

  • The 2012 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced. As usual, they are hilariously awful. My fave:

    “I’ll never get over him,” she said to herself and the truth of that statement settled into her brain the way glitter settles on to a plastic landscape in a Christmas snow globe when she accepted the fact that she was trapped in bed between her half-ton boyfriend and the wall when he rolled over on to her nightgown and passed out, leaving her no way to climb out.

  • I've been meaning to write on a peeve of mine: Comcast envelopes in the mail proclaiming "IMPORTANT INFORMATION ENCLOSED".

    And it is invariably not IMPORTANT. Instead, Comcast wants to sell me something new.

    Gosh, you think anyone else might be irked? Thanks to Google, I can tell you the answer is: yes, yes, yes, yes, …