Eh?! Why it's Christmas Day!

'Twas the noche before Navidad

A Spanish/English version of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas from Spanish-Translation-Help.com. They also have some links to traditional villancicos (Spanish Christmas carols) and some English faves sung in Espanol.

‘Twas the night before Christmas y por toda la casa,
Not a creature was stirring-Caramba! Que pasa?

Los niños were tucked away in their camas,
Some in long underwear, some in pijamas,

While hanging the medias with mucho ciudado
In hopes that old Santa would feel obligado

To bring all children, both buenos y malos,
A nice batch of dulces y otros regalos.

Outside in the yard there arose such a grito
That I jumped to my pies like a frightened cabrito.

I ran to the window and looked out afuera,
And who in the world do you think that it era?

Saint Nick in a sleigh and a big red sombrero
Came dashing along like a crazy bombero.

And pulling his sleigh instead of venados
Were eight little burros approaching volados.

I watched as they came and this quaint little hombre
Was shouting and whistling and calling by nombre:

"Ay Pancho, ay Pepe, ay Cuco, ay Berto,
Ay Chato, ay Chopo, Macuco, y Nieto!"

Then standing erect with his hands on his pecho
He flew to the top of our very own techo.

With his round little belly like a bowl of jalea,
He struggled to squeeze down our old chiminea,

Then huffing and puffing at last in our sala,
With soot smeared all over his real suit de gala,

He filled all the medias with lovely regalos-
For none of the niños had been very malos.

Then chuckling aloud, seeming muy contento,
He turned like a flash and was gone como viento.

And I heard him exclaim, and this is verdad,
Merry Christmas to all, y Feliz Navidad!

Chickens! Concert Series (#32): Three Days Gace

You may not remember Three Days Grace from the time I went to their concert in S'toon when they were touring for One-X (this was pre-blog, I only vaguely remember it myself and most of that is due to KW reminding me). Anyway, the Trews and Default opened for them.

They stared with a cover of Johnny Cash's "God's Gonna Cut You Down" and then some police sirens and spinning red lights. They played some new stuff from their 3rd album called "Life Starts Now" and a bunch of old stuff. I loves me some 3DG! Good times. We missed Default though but quite frankly I'm fine with that. Here's the setlist:
1. Break
2. The Good Life
3. Pain
4. Bitter Taste
5. Wake Up
6. I Hate Everything About You
7. World So Cold
8. Home (they had flames shooting up from the stage in this one, good times)
9. Drum Solo (they
10. I Don't Care (Apocalyptica cover)
11. Last To Know
12. The Chain (Fleetwood Mac cover)
13. Never Too Late
14. Riot
Encore:
15. Lost In You
16. Just Like You
17. Animal I Have Become

Change Blindness

Also known as "Inattentional Blindness" is the inability to recognize visual changes that occur in your direct field of perception because you are paying attention to something else. An easy example would be something like not noticing that a street light changed colour even though you are looking right at it because you are listening to your friend talking to you. This is related to our ability to block out extraneous information and focus on specific stimuli. Which is advantageous when you are trying to listen to a single conversation in a noisy room, but not so good when you are called on to be a witness to a crime that happened right in front of you while you were busy. Some people have taught themselves to pay attention to specific stimuli above all else because it holds some special fascination for them. These are people who have a "good memory for faces/details/colours/bones/etc". And some people have trained themselves to be more conscious of changes in their surroundings in general, these are people who are "cops/spies/nosy/etc". Anyway, now that you are forewarned that that is what we're doing, here are a few good videos on the issue. Good times being nerdy!

First, here is one discussing an interesting experiment on the subject:

I know most of you have seen that awareness video with the ball passing and the bear (here). I think that it is a bit of cheating in these types of videos because they are it intentionally telling you to focus on something else to trick you. These types of awareness tests are easy if you ignore the "task" you are given and just watch normally:

But try and do the task AND find the change. It's still hard to do even if you know to be looking for something crazy. It's so hard to focus on two things! This one is a good one because it is just distracting you instead of actively telling you to do something else:

Here is a good one done by the same city of London bike safety guys to do the moonwalking bear mentioned above. These series of ads were to raise awareness of people's lack of awareness of cyclists on the road. McShanty points if you find more than 3 changes (the bear turning into a suit of armor doesn't count because it's too obvious, find a harder one dang it!). This one is tough because even though you know to look for the changes, a lot is happening at once and you don't know where the changes will occur so it is hard to know where focus your attention. FYI there are 21 changes during the course of the video.

p.s. Without looking, did you see a red wagon behind the gorilla on the picture at the top of the post? Did you have to look before you knew the answer?

Borden System Words: British Columbia

BC is a gold mine of good words! Please bare in mind that many of these are probably in the water, especially those with the upper East-West designation (third letter) of V, U, or T. We also still have a few slackers: DQ, EP, EQ, FQ, IV, IU, IT, IS, and IR all have no words and I already used up the words from DP in the Alberta words post. However we still have quite a few:

HU – haut, haul
HT – hits, heth, hats, hath, hate
HS – hiss, hest, hast, hasp, hash
HR – hire, hers, hero, herm, herl, here, herd, herb, hart, harp, harm, harl, hark, hare, hard
GU – glut, glum, glug, glue, geum, gaur, gaud
GT – gits, gets, geta, gats, gate
GS – gist, gest, gast, gasp, gash
GR – girt, giro, girl, gird, germ, gars, garb
FU – flux, flus, flue, flub, feud, faux, faun
FT – fits, fete, feta, fats, fate
FS – fist, fish, fisc, fess, fast
FR – firs, firn, firm, fire, fern, fere, fart, faro, farm, farl, fare, fard
ET – efts, eats
ES – else, east, ease
ER – ecru, ears, earn, earl
DS – diss, disk, dish, disc
DR – dirt, dirk, dire

That's a grand total of 96 potential Borden words! Outstanding! Especially compared to Alberta's abysmal 16 words even after I took out a bunch of the sketchy words that the Scrabble thing churned out and for which I couldn't find any good definitions, like "hets", "hist", "hisn", "hern", "gaun", "fets", and "feus". I also took out a few crazy Scots words like "dirl", "girn", "fash" and "eath"(this is despite certain Diana Gabaldon books that I may or may not have read and from which I learned several of these), and a dialect word or two like "gaum" and "dere". FYI: "heth" is the eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, a "herm" is a monument or statue consisting of a four-sided column tapering inward from top to bottom with a bust of Hermes on top, "firn" is granular snow accumulated on high mountains and subsequently compacted into glacial ice (or a field of same). Anyway, BC is good because it has several key dirty (both symbolic and literal) words including "fart" and "germ". Fart is clearly the front runner here so far (much better than Sask/Alberta with "dink". No swears yet though. We'll just see what Manitoba has to say.