photo adventures, slang, afrikaans, funtheory, etc
I’ve been on some photo adventures lately, first to Green Point Stadium and most recently to Cape Town’s container port. Both were fun and interesting and I think I got some decent shots.
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Today marked, I believe, my first subconscious use of SA slang–isit, meaning “really?” or “is that so?”. What’s funny about my saying it is that it still sounds odd to hear other people say it. “I’m going to the container port” “Oh, isit?” “Uh…is what?”
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I think it’s time to start learning some Afrikaans, even if it’s just greetings and how-are-yous and I’m-sorry-I-don’t-speak-Afrikaans. Most people at work speak it, some as a first language and its also my flatmate’s first language. I’ll just have to fit it in my head with English, German and touches of Spanish, Chinese, and Zulu. But that’s it! No more languages after that!
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I like this fun theory business. The idea is that the best way to get people to change their behavior is to make it fun. Here’s one example.
(It’s a marketing campaign for VW, by the way. Not sure of the tie in…)
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This is a pretty tremendous photo series covering 27 months in the life of a US soldier from graduating high school to returning from a tour in Iraq.
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I enjoyed this piece in Wired:
According to archival footage, Brown was standing on his toilet seat on the evening of Nov. 5, 1955, attempting to hang a clock in his bathroom, when he slipped and slammed his head on the side of the sink. Upon regaining consciousness Brown reported having “a revelation, a picture, a picture in my head.†A picture which he crudely scrawled down on a piece of paper and subsequently spent 30 years of his life and family fortune to build.
That picture, of course, was the flux capacitor. And as every high school physics student knows, it’s the device that makes time travel possible.
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The incidents leading up to the time machine demise also served as the basis for the award-winning documentary, Back to the Future.
November 7th, 2009 at 6:18 am
We have some friends from Singapore and they say “isit” also. I’ve heard “Oh, isit?” from them more times than I can count.