anuran

So in keeping with my new years resolutions, I finally started a greek class this evening. There's just not enough women with big hair overreacting to everything in my life. Also, I've been conjugating regular Greek verbs in my head for 8 years, it's about time I learned some new ones.



It was a heck of a lot better than I was expecting. The class is taught by two teachers: an Orthodox Deacon from Falkirk, who does the tough grammar, and a younger Greek woman who is incredibly hot and does the conversational stuff.

So first, we all had to write a paragraph about ourselves in Greek, to assess our abilities. "My name is Sarah, I work in Falkirk, I have a cat called Whisky, I don't understand Greek."

Although it probably came out as "me namo sarah, Worky me of Falkirk, Have a cat my name is Whisky, I don't understand Greaks"

Astonishingly, they put me in the intermediate group, and as Eleni led away the beginners to learn the alphabet, the Deacon got the whiteboard markers out and taught us the past imperfect tense, and it was AMAZING and I really, really enjoyed it. It's all to do with getting enough syllables so that the third one from the end has the stress. He also explained where the words come from - lots of modern Greek verbs are compounds of ancient Greek ones. So the linguistical geekery was off the scale.

e.g. exit in (modern) Greek is έξοδος, έξ- meaning "leave" and οδος meaning "road" - "έξοδος" = the road to leave on. And in English έξοδος is pronounced exodus. SEE WHAT I MEAN.

Also, about halfway through the lesson, the priest (the Greek school is in the church hall of the orthodox church) came in and sat in a corner for a bit. This happens all the time in actual Greece.

So that was great, loads better than expected - especially getting properly taught the language rather than just useful words and phrases. Will return. May post about it here to bore you all.

Valve get a parcel from Weta Workshop

OH WAIT girls aren't allowed Lego teknik any more.

Each term in the Fibonacci sequence is derived by adding the two preceding terms:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 …

Remarkably, you can use successive terms to convert miles to kilometers:

8 miles ≈ 13 kilometers
13 miles ≈ 21 kilometers

This works because the two units stand in the golden ratio (to within 0.5 percent).

- If you're not reading Futility Closet, you probably should be

This film looks AMAZING

By amazing I mean terrible.

Suprisingly funny, try 12:10 onwards and also towards the end