Et Maitenant

I read in todays Sunday Time probably the best pun ever. It is attributed to the recently deceased journalist, musician, broadcaster and franglais exponent Miles Kington.

He claimed that the French Navy had adopted a new, uplifting call to arms for the greater glory and protection of their nation. In English it reads: "To the water, the hour has come." And in French: "A l'eau, c'est l'heure." (Think about it.)

Perfection.

Words of Charity

One of the downsides of these days of debit cards is that you often don't have any change in your pocket when someone rattles the charity tin at you as happened to me today as I left Morrisons. I've a lot of time for these people who give up their Sunday afternoons collecting money for good causes only to be ignored by 90% of shoppers who walk past them, heads down avoiding eye contact.

To assuage my guilt, I went to FreeRice.com. It's a bit like The Hunger Site, but instead of clicking to donate cups of food, the FreeRice site has a word definition game and every time you get a question right, they donate 20 grains of rice. I had to spend some time on it to raise the 1,380 grains that was my contribution to add to the 165,361,240 grains donated yesterday.

If you're going to give it a go, I should warn you that the more questions you get right, the harder it gets and you may want to cheat when you start hitting words like adumbrate, dehiscent and chersonese. There is no penalty in giving wrong answers other than your difficulty rating drops. All in all, an entertaining way to donate to charity and improve your vocabulary at the same time.