I don't know if this applies to anyone outside of California, but it's pretty interesting regardless.

Ben and I hear the term "Sigalert" once in a while on the radio in terms of traffic conditions, and we always wondered what the heck a Sigalert was.  Well, my brother called me this morning and told me to go to www.sigalert.com (because he was in some hellacious LA traffic and needed to see some light at the end of the freeway, so to speak), and that got me to do some research.  It's actually really interesting:

"SigAlerts originated in 1955 with the Los Angeles Police Department. By the early 1950s, the rapidly growing number of automobilesin Los Angeles had greatly increased the frequency and severity of traffic accidents and jams. Radio stations reported traffic conditions, but the LAPD refused to call radio stations with this information, so each station would call the LAPD, a process that tied up telephone lines and forced officers to repeat the same information again and again.

In 1955, Loyd C. "Sig" Sigmon began developing a solution. Sigmon was Executive Vice President of Golden West Broadcasters (a company owned by singing cowboy Gene Autry). Sigmon had worked for Golden West's station KMPC-AM 710 in 1941, but found himself in the United States Army Signal Corps during World War II, assigned to General Dwight D. Eisenhower's staff, in charge of non-combat radio communications in the European theater. Now, he proposed to apply his knowledge of complex radio networks to the situation in Los Angeles.

Sigmon developed a specialized radio receiver and tape recorder. When the receiver picked up a particular tone, it would switch on the tape deck and record the subsequent bulletin. The device cost about $600. The LAPD's chief, William H. Parker, was interested though skeptical, warning the inventor, "We're going to name this damn thing Sigalert." More practically, he refused to use it unless the receivers were made available to all LA radio stations -- it could not be a KMPC monopoly.

Initially, half a dozen stations installed Sigmon receivers that had "Sigalert" stamped on its side. When a message had been received and recorded from the LAPD, a red light, sometimes accompanied by a buzzer, would alert the radio stations' engineers. Depending on the nature of the problem, the engineer could air the police broadcast immediately, interrupting regular programming if necessary."

The more you know..... :)

I'm supposed to be writing a play...well, editing a play...right now. I wrote it entirely before Glenn was born, because I figured I wouldn't want to write afterwards (and I was right).  But the church for whom I am writing this couldn't tell me how many people were to be in it this year, at the time.  So, I created 13 characters.  So I finally got the list, and it's 24 kids.  Geeez.  So I'm really stretching my brain as to how on earth I'm going to fit 24 characters on stage, have them all speak so their parents can say, "there's my Jimmy!" and not be boring.  I mean, 24 characters to interact in the plot is really a stretch.  I almost had a break when 5 of the little kids were all going to be in a children's choir...but then the director wanted 2 to be coffee girls for one scene (so that's 2 more characters and dialogue to create), and then one wasn't going to be in the play and instead his 13 year old brother is...so that's a character I haven't even created yet (or figured out how he is going to fit into the plot at all).  And right now I'm on scene 6 trying to figure out how to incorporate a poet into this mess.  

Bleh.

24 characters.  I don't think people realize how difficult this is.  I mean, I know it's just a church play, and it's all kids...but it's MY writing, and I don't want a crappy play with lobsters in it or anything.  Last year I even got a  temporal shift to work. This one is almost along the same lines.  I took some direction from "Citizen Kane" (and the main character is Veronica Kane...but I think that's much funnier than anyone else does...and she has a dog, Rosebud).  Anyway, I'm just being stretched a little here with so many characters...and I just don't want it to be dumb.  Because one day I might be rich and famous, and this little nugget will turn up and I'll have to explain it away.

themes  ·  The importance of love and compassion; social injustice in nineteenth-century France; the long-term effects of the French Revolution on French society

I was just curious why the letter y is ambiguously categorized between vowels and consonants, and here's what I found:

"Yes, the letter Y is a vowel or a consonant! In terms of sound, a vowel is 'a speech sound which is produced by comparatively open configuration of the vocal tract, with vibration of the vocal cords but without audible friction...', while a consonant is 'a basic speech sound in which the breath is at least partly obstructed' (definitions from the New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998). The letter Y can be used to represent different sounds in different words, and can therefore fit either definition. In myth or hymn it is clearly a vowel, and also in words such as my, where it stands for a diphthong (a combination of two vowel sounds). On the other hand, in a word like beyond there is an obstacle to the breath which can be heard between two vowels, and the same sound begins words like young and yes. (This consonant sound, like that of the letter W, is sometimes called a 'semivowel' because it is made in a similar way to a vowel, but functions in contrast to vowels when used in words.) Whether the letter Y is a vowel or a consonant is therefore rather an arbitrary decision. The letter is probably more often used as a vowel, but in this role is often interchangeable with the letter I. However, the consonant sound is not consistently represented in English spelling by any other letter, and perhaps for this reason Y tends traditionally to be counted among the consonants."

The funny thing is, I've heard somewhere (I think it's in a poetry book somewhere in my heap of unorganized books) that other letters also fall under this subsection of grammar, such as the letter f.  I think...but I don't remember exactly.  And maybe H.  

I'm watching National Geographic right now and they were searching for anacondas, but they ran into a herd of capybaras first.  I've seen these before in the zoo, but I think it just hit me that these are 150 guinea pigs.  

This page has info about them.  They're pretty cool.  We had guinea pigs for a few years.  The first one, Ophellia, died (should have seen that coming).  Replaced her with characters who survived their play: Oberon and Puck.  Puck died after 3 years, and he was my favorite (he loved having his head scratched) so I replaced him with Chewbaca (he literally looked like chewbaca).  But then he bit my finger and I had to get 2 stitches...so now we have a cage :)  (they're fine, I put them up for adoption at PetCo)

Anyway, giant rodents now freak me out.  That's a lotta stitches.

Thanks Mr.Bill for this test!  Here are my results:

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