Here's a rather charming postal mail story

This Sunday Independent article shows the UK post office at its best, I think:
We may be living in the era of the email, but one young illustrator has proved that the art of correspondence is far from dead. While working for her degree at Glasgow School of Art Harriet Russell decided to find out exactly what lengths the men and women of the Royal Mail were willing to go to to ensure the safe delivery of her missives.
To put them to the test she concealed the addresses of 130 letters to herself in a series of increasingly complex puzzles and ciphers. Among the disguises she employed were dot-to-dot drawings, anagrams and cartoons. The answer, it seems, was very far indeed. Amazingly, only 10 failed to complete their journey back to her.

Masai Woman - old postcard

Another older card, sent to my chum Slim in Hawaii.
On back:
Masai Woman
Copyright by Sapra Studio - P.O. Box 5882, Nairobi

Commencement ceremony - postcard

Sent to my nephew S- in South Africa
On back:
Commencement Ceremony, Crossroads School, Santa Monica, California
Photograph by © Lauren Greenfield
Courtesy Stephen Cohen Gallery

A couple of recommendations

• If you need to mail order any of the excellent South African punk or industrial CDs that are only available in that country, and that would be pretty much all of them, I highly recommend Rhythm Online. My most recent purchase from them was the recent Van Coke Cartel album. It cost only R100 (divide by around 7 for USD amount) plus postage, and got to me in around a week. Excellent!
• If you never get around to writing postal letters anymore because either writing or printign the letter out, then addressing an envelope and having to find a stamp is too much hassle, I highly recommend Postful. You can send the letter to them as an email, ad they will do the rest of the mailing process. And they're very reasonably priced.
  

Couple of links

• Cute: postcard delivered 93 years too late.
• Language Log on lexical blending and the banning of Get Fuzzy.
  

Latin, brains, funny church signs, non-english music

It's Sunday. And here is today's top 5:

The BBC reports the view of the Vatican's 'chief Latinist' that the future of that language at the Holy See is in trouble. Among other things
...more junior members of the Catholic hierarchy are less enthusiastic about Latin than the recent Popes.
At the Vatican, bishops appointments are still written on papyrus in Latin as are letters of congratulations from the pope, but many bishops and cardinals write back asking for translations.
When I was at the UCT, introductory Latin was very well attended, because it was required for all law students. I was one of the very few that took Latin because I was really interested in the language.
I remember too that the memory of the lecturer was absolutely amazing. There were at least a couple of hundred people in the class, and she soon had everybody's name memorized.

The older I get, the less dogmatic I get. When I was a spiritual young oke I was convinced that consciousness was independent of the body. Now, I'm not so sure and am actually swinging the other way. This story, about a bloke that "forgot the urge to smoke" after suffering damage brain damage after a stroke, is tangentially related to this observation.

To make it easier to maintain a US postal address while I am out of the country, I signed up for an account with Remote Control Mail. With this service, any postal mail received is viewable over the WWW.

Funny church signs from Ship of Fools, 'the magazine of Christian unrest.'

Blog recommendation: 'We promote non-english language music' is pretty much what it sounds like. For music you may not hear about elsewhere, check them out. I found them through a search for fokofpolisiekar, but they are fairly diverse in their offerings. For instance, the last few entries profile Slovak punk, traditional Ladino, Turkish rock, French pop, Klezmer, Afropop. Most of the links seem to be to Youtube - I wish there were more mp3 downloads.