ozarque

Recommended link......

"The revolutionary Phraselator P2, developed by defense contractor Voxtec International in the aftermath of 9/11, is a handheld unit that allows the user to instantly translate spoken English words and phrases into any Native language. "Phraselator holds tens or thousands of phrases, words and songs in one machine. You can hold your entire language in the palm of your hand," said Thornton. Since early 2005, dozens of Native speakers have begun recording their languages onto the hi-tech machines. Many are among the last speakers of their languages."

Full story at http://i-newswire.com/pr54795.html

I'm not going to be able to get a lot done here with comments until the LJ techies get the bugs straightened out for people using Macs -- I'm sorry. When I try to post a comment I get a screen that asks me to post my username and password, but I'm not able to type anything in the boxes provided -- the screen won't let me -- and I haven't found any way to work around that problem. Leaving the comment space to go log in doesn't help, since when I go back to the comment I'm no longer logged in. I've been leaving "signed" comments as a way of working around this barrier; whether they're reaching anybody or not, I have no idea.

One of my children sent me an e-mail this morning suggesting that I take a look at the "Granny Gets A Vibrator" blog at http://grannyvibe.blogspot.com . Because I trust that child, I did go look, and I ended up reading maybe a dozen of the posts. Maybe more.

Certain sentences grabbed my attention. For example: "But when Grandmother finally bought Travis a motorcycle and threatened to ride around on the back of it with him, the relatives ganged up and had her checked into a nursing home, where she promptly died of sheer boredom." This one made me think of my own Grandmother Lewis, who lived to be 96 in her own home but also died most promptly when she was "checked into a nursing home." It also brought forcibly to my mind the fact that my Grandmother Lewis would no more have ridden around on the back of some man's motorcycle than she would have flown around the room under her own power.

The author of this blog is 52 -- seventeen years younger than I am -- and is a very different brand of aging lady. She uses an assortment of words I don't use, and her blog has really handsome photographs all over the place, and she's obviously able to log in to her blog at all times. She is clearly taking the eldering path seriously, and she intends to do it right, and to do it with panache. If eldering interests you, you might want to go take a look yourself.

There's an interview with Wendell Berry, by Rose Marie Berger, online at http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0407&article=040710x .

It's long -- my printout is 8 single-spaced pages. If you don't mind long, you'll find that it touches on many of the topics we've been discussing in this journal over the past year or so.