I'd missed the YouTube demos. [link] Yup, it flashes. I don't see how to you go from thing to thing either. I like her haircut - looks better in the second vid than in the first.

When I was working at my dad's office one summer, I came across a medical report that said something like, "Patient suffered cardiac arrest and sudden death. This was particularly serious considering patient's prior history of sudden death."

Was this patient's name Daniel Jackson or Buffy Summers, by any chance?

People who think My Little Ponies are freakier than Peeps should click here: [link] To see a Preview. People who think My Little Ponies are cute should click on that only after getting drunk.

t glares

You killed the thread milady.

Muahahahahaahahahahhaahahhah.

t /mine is an evil laugh

...And Jaime is also in tonight's episode of Batman.

Fay! I just watched the first episode of Leverage. It's a lot of fun! I can tell I'm going to enjoy the rest.

Tom Scola, how are you so awesome?

(What? Really, it should be the standard Scola greeting.)

Nine sara/hs in my graduating class of 350. Five in my AP English class. (Only) three in my Intro to Judaic Civ class in college, but we all talked a lot.

I know I said this before, but EIGHT of the 30 girls in my High School class were called Nicola, with various different spellings. Eight. And there were maybe four or five floating around in the other two classes in my yeargroup.

And my parents thought it was an unusual name.

I - really don't much care for my name, actually. I mean, I don't give it much thought one way or the other, and I don't loathe it, but I think it's a fairly crappy and generic 'middle class girl born in England in the 70s' kind of name. (There are two of us at my current place of employment.*)

I am irrational and opinionated about names. I DO rather like proper nouns getting co-opted as names, like 'Memory' and 'Ethiopia' and 'Apple' and so forth. I also like traditional names, from whatever part of the world.

I get unreasonably tetchy about traditional names with whacky 'unique' spellings like, oh, Nyckee, or something, because I just find them ugly to look at. (Despite the fact that my own name has a fairly useless H in the middle, and that my wee sister changed her middle name from Jane to Jacqellinne when she was six or so ("I'm not a plain Jane!") and spelled it in some higgledypiggledy fashion that I never actually learned**. Hypocrisy: I can haz it!)

If a name is made up, how I feel about it hinges on whether I think it sounds and looks aesthetically pleasing...and, thinking about it, this has a lot to do with spelling patterns. Particularly gratuitous use of doubled vowels or...basically, if it looks like it's come from the Krispy Kreme school of amusing spellings, then I am not usually filled with love. (Yes, Stephanie Meyer, I am looking at you. Rennesmee. ffs.) ita, for example, I think is a lovely name - and not just because ita can kill me with her pinky finger, or because she happens to be awesome, but because it's simple and elegant, both visually and aurally.

Um. In breaking news, sometimes I am unreasonable and judgmental. Also, inconsistent. Don't all faint at once.

• this is part of the reason I found it particularly ironic that at the American school where I worked before my current place, the Headmistress could not seem to wrap her head around my name. She called me Nicholas, regularly, or Nicole. For a year. Which...okay, I get that Nic(h)ola is not a common name in West Virginia, lady, but given that 99% of the children in the school had Arabic names, it's not like learning a new name should really be SUCH a wildly new experience. A year. She still didn't know my name with any certainty by the end of the fucking YEAR.

• *She reverted to Jane when she was, er, 12 or 13, iirc. My sister - never lacking in strength of character.

(Yes, Stephanie Meyer, I am looking at you. Rennesmee. ffs.)

Ironically, it's actually Stephenie.

At my summer camp (a Jewish camp with rather strong Zionist leanings), just about every bunk would have at least one Ari or Jordana. WAY too many parents taking naming inspiration from Exodus.

All those boys named Ari did make it a bit easier when, around sixth grade or so, it became the thing to do to either crochet a yarmulke or weave a bracelet for the boy you liked with his name in it, and it's much easier to figure out how to crochet Ari than Jonathan or something like that.