Fun Finds Around The Web

Via bOing bOing, I come across this amazing, open-source effort to render the English-language in limericks. An example:

apostrophe by mino (Limerick #5331)

The apostrophe's often abused:
It gets battered, and bruised, and misused.
On a plural, a blight;
For possessives, just right,
Barring "its", which leaves people confused.

Via Pharyngula, a wonderful discovery: the Language Log, a group blog maintained by academic linguists with a real knack for rendering in popular terms what can seem to be be a dusty discipline. The news-making post was a spoof on the Kansas ID debate, recasting the issue at hand as King James Absolutism, but almost every post on their site keep me clicking. A series of posts on the "snowclones" phenomenon, which this community defines as "some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists," leads to this fascinating analysis of the bloggy phrase: "I, for one, welcome our new X overlords."