Marauder is undertaking to teach himself and his daughters Esperanto.
I’ll admit to a small curiosity about it. The main thing I gained from two years of Latin in high school and two semesters of Spanish in college is a healthy respect for anyone who can communicate in something other than their native tongue.
The key points I remember from Latin are, agricola is “farmer”, poeta is “poet”, insula is “island” and nautica(?) is a sailor (and also a brand of clothing). These are the only masculine nouns which end in -a, all the others end in -us. Also, there are a number of cheap phonetic jokes to be made from the verbs “to make”, “to give” and the number six. Their Latin counterparts are “facio”, “dixit” and “sex.” I’ll let you work out the approximate pronunciations on your own.
Likewise, in Spanish, when you wish someone a happy birthday, be darn sure to pronounce the ñ in “cumpleaños” and no matter how badly you screw up, never claim to be “muy embarazada” unless you’re due to give birth in the very near future. Aside from that, I can ask important questions such as “Donde es el baño?” but it’s not at all certain that I’ll understand the answer.
A few weeks ago, MC encouraged me to learn enough Chinese (I think it’s the Mandarin dialect) to say hello to her children. They speak Chinese at home, but it takes the kids by surprise to hear the language from a non-Chinese. I learned the equivalents of “Hello” and “My name is Blair” (the latter is phonetically similar to “Watch Out, Blair” which some number of people would doubtless point out is a fair warning) and when I said Hello to the children, I did well enough that they understood me and were suitably surprised. But when I later told MC that I’d also learned how to ask “What is your name?” and demonstrated, she collapsed in laughter.
So although I wish Marauder and the girls much success in their linguistic endeavors, for the time being I’m going to let someone else be the pastry chef.

This weekend’s outdoor temperatures and humidity were both unbearably high, so rather than do any yardwork on Sunday, I decided to spend the afternoon in a nice air-conditioned movie theater.
A lot of the commentary I’ve encountered about The Dark Knight has been about Heath Ledger as The Joker. Although some of his movies (most notably, Brokeback Mountain) got a lot of attention, I haven’t heard much talk about Heath Ledger. So I figured all the chatter now was probably due to some sort of “posthumous Ledger-mania” and didn’t pay much attention to it.
Going in, my expectation was that this would be “just another Batman movie”, and to a certain extent, that’s exactly what it was. What makes this one different though is that Batman wasn’t really the movie’s focus. Sure, there’s a lot of attention to how the Batman operates and all that (and lots of cool gadgets), but I really think this one was more about the Joker, Harvey Dent, and some of the other typically smaller characters and what motivates them. (Alfred, of course, has most of the best lines. “But I bloody well did tell you.”)
Definitely worth seeing.

I’ve recently switched to the new 3.0 version of Firefox, among my reasons, I was interested in some of the new security features. Logging into my Google account this morning, I got a first hand demonstration of how well it works.

Taking a closer look, the problem arises because I didn’t include the “www” at the beginning of the address, but Google could have fixed that a couple ways — probably the easiest would be a simple http redirect. (For example, try to visit http://dactylmanor.org/blair/zero/. I don’t have that set up everywhere, but it’s doable.)