July 13th, 2009: A few days ago I had a comic about the raspberry (fartnoise) sound not being a phenome in any natural language, which Arnold Zwicky shared on the always-delightful Language Log. A reader of the site had emailed us both with a question, and when Zwicky responded I took the opportunity to thank him for the post and the shouts out, as I am not one to miss out on the chance to use an internal plural while emailing a professor of linguistics!

This in turn inspired a post by Arnold on internal inflection, which I found incredibly valuable because it suggests the pluralization of hard on could be the amazing and stunning hards on. Should any of us ever find ourselves in a situation in which we must refer to a collection of boners, I certainly hope we'll remember to say, "You guys! What's with all the hards on?"

The English language, ladies and gentlemen! SO AWESOME.

– Ryan

July 10th, 2009: There's a blog collecting Laser Portraits from the past and today my friend Allene sent in her school laser photo from grade three and it's funny and cute and what I'm saying is my school photos were never THIS awesome.

– Ryan

July 9th, 2009: Shortly after this comic went up, Greg sent me a link to The Odds Of Dying From..., which is very handy if you're an American and you want to know the lifetime odds of dying from, say, a "foreign body entering through skin or natural orifice", which are (just?) 1 in 103,004.

As Greg points out, the current odds of dying from being "bitten or crushed by non-venemous snakes and lizards" are at 0! The lesson here is clear, you guys: FEEL FREE TO ANNOY ALL THE NON-VENEMOUS SANKES AND LIZARDS YOU WANT, THEY CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT

FLASH UPDATE: A few readers pointed me to the WHO International Classification of Diseases, 10th Edition, which enumerates all sorts of problems you can have, more completely than the selection I linked to above. And it's only a hop skip and a jump from there to just reading this list as Tons Of Ways You Can Die. There's no probabilities, but it includes some fun ones like T63.9 ("Toxic effect of contact with unspecified venomous animal"), W.19 ("Unspecified fall") and V97.3 ("Person on ground injured in air transport accident"), clarified on the site as "Sucked into a jet".

FUN TIMES AT THE WHO AND DINOSAUR COMICS TODAY

– Ryan