Heard this morning (on Way with Words, naturally) about the XKCD comic called Up Goer 5, which diagrams a space vehicle (I think it's a pretty typical one) using only the 1000 most commonly used words in English: https://xkcd.com/1133/; they went on to talk about the Up Goer 5 text editor, which is a clever little tool in which you can input text and they flag it whenever the vocabularly falls outside of the "1000 most" criteria. Tried it with directions on how to make a sandwich. Clearly my vocabulary is very sophisticated. Virtually every other word was flagged.
Thanks to an excellent picture posted by my colleague and friend Dave Stone (biologist, entomologist and wild-life photographer extraordinaire), I now know that geese have teeth, scary, tearing-looking teeth, and that they are made of keratin, the same material of which their beaks and the base of their quills are made. Look at this:
I would not like to find myself in a beak-related confrontation with this thing.
I learned that April 23 is definitely not too late to have frost in East Central Illinois. Glad I don't have anything specially tender in the ground right now.
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| West Side Park, about 7 am |
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