19 kids died of swine flu.  And of course this is a bad thing, and I’m not minimizing it, but…

About 15,400 kids died of malaria.  (91% of 881,000, divided by 52 weeks in a year, rounded to 3 significant figures.)  But for whatever reason those kids didn’t make the news.

Please comment about things that are deadlier than swine flu.

During my misspent undergrad years, one of the non-regrettable portions comprises three years of Spanish that extended into Spanish-medium classes in linguistic theory and history.  From second year on, papers and presentations became a main focus in order to more or less beat people into hitting a useful level of fluency.  However, a certain portion of the class, instead of learning to write anything longer than a sentence in Spanish, found out about Babelfish, with the result that the rest of us also learned to spot a Babelfished paper.  (It was really easy when they accidentally hit Portuguese instead of Spanish, although the two are similar enough for a Babelfisher to not catch the switch until it’s too late.)

A bag of potting soil proudly announces that it is “Made from All Natural Organic Ingredients,” and below that, “Hecho de Todos los Ingredientes Orgánicos Naturales.”

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On a forum I frequent, there is a game known as “Corrupt a Wish” in which players state how the player before’s wish could be granted in a way that ends up not working out right. In and of itself, this is relevant to gaming because it’s excellent practice for game masters whose players can Wish. Also, wishes’ wording sometimes makes gaming relevant in other ways.

Player before me: I wish I had more initiative.

Me: Granted, but now your attack rolls suck.

Click the pic for more information.

Somehow the lesson swap site that I started for my grad school class disappeared. The database is still there but the scripts and files are missing. Restore-from-backup time, yay. Still not sure how that happened.