The Bran Report: January 28

Promising Light

New Obsession: Promising Light, by Iron and Wine.

This makes me want to learn how to play this song, even though my skills at music are so meagre that I actually re-wrote this post so that I wouldn't have to come right out and say how many of what instrument I think are neccesary to play it. JUST IN CASE I AM WRONG.

My grammatical skills right now are a Talifar for how much preparation I am putting into the Hydropower exam. It is a fact universally acknowledged that preparation anxiety lack of skill correlation logarithms charts graphs blah.

Hynafgwyr can

So, because a man can only do so much reading about Turbines before he goes crazy, I spent a lot of today reading Wikipedia. As so often happens, I ended up reading something with no idea of how I had got there.

Specifically, I was reading about England's two Archbishops. In any case, I was curious about this sentance:

"John Tucker Mugabi Sentamu, PhD, (born 10 June 1949) is the 97th Archbishop of York, Metropolitan of the province of York, and Primate of England. He is the second most senior cleric in the Church of England, after the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the first member of an ethnic minority to serve as an archbishop in the Church of England."

However, his immediate superior to the south, Rowan Williams, is (by nation and mother tongue) Welsh. He was definitely an Archbishop before Sentamu. If you go by language, Welsh people aren't even a majority in Wales. I don't want to get into a debate about what race even is, but I will say that when they struck Coal in the Welsh valleys a few hundred years ago, a lot of Yorkshiremen moved there.

It's almost like the Welsh have some characteristic that makes people think they're part of Britain's ethnic majority. Strange...

Animals that eat you

Someone is trying to scare me away from Scotland.

""The name of this species is similarly intimidating in many other languages. In Finnish and in Dutch it is called miekkavalas and zwaardwalvis respectively, which means "sword whale". To the Haida people native to the islands of Haida Gwaii off the coast of British Columbia, the animal was known as skana or "killing demon". The Japanese call them shachi (鯱), whose kanji character combines the radicals for fish (魚) and tiger (虎). In Chinese it's called "虎鲸" (tiger whale) or "逆戟鲸" (reversed halbert whale).""
...
""Isidore of Seville [7th century CE] (Etymologies, Book 12, 2:23-24): The name comes from the Greeks, who call the animal lukos. This word also indicates their morals, they rapaciously kill whatever they encounter, and always desire blood.""

And just days after Durham jumped ahead of Edinburgh in the PhD race. Coincidence? YOU DECIDE.

Woot

Your Result
Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between African American and European American.

Hurraya for me.

Origin of the genteel insult 'Berk'.

Apparently it comes from Cockney rhyming slang. The full term is "Berkshire hunt", which for for (um) another unflattering term that rhymes with "Hunt".

This delights me.