Here are some things that have been going on recently (for various values of 'recently') in regions of the blogosphere tangent to this one:

• Away With Words, Nancy Friedman's blog about "names, brands, writing, and the quirks of the English language," is now called Fritinancy—a delightfully evocative and tantalizingly obscure word meaning 'twittering'. (The OED gives it as fritiniency, with the stress on the second syllable, and calls it obsolete, but says also that "the mod. Dicts. spell fritinancy"; I'm not sure why they don't have an entry for the newer spelling.) Friedman (who also has one of the coolest job titles I've ever seen, namely Chief Wordworker) chose the new name for its distinctiveness, its resonance with her own last and first names, and its aptness as a description of the light and informal tone of bloggish discourse.
• Meanwhile, Simon Holloway at Davar Akher has been tagged with a give-us-a-glimpse-of-your-library sort of meme. The instructions are to post the sixth, seventh, and eighth sentences on page 123 of the nearest book of sufficient length; Holloway comes up with a tome on Biblical Hebrew syntax, and provides not only the required passage, but also a neat scholarly exegesis of it. And then he tags, among others, me. I won't try to emulate Holloway's extensive commentary, but I will at least festoon my excerpt with potentially informative links. The relevant sentences from the closest book at hand are these:

  Taking the voiceless affricate series as representative, Navaho matches its [ts, č, ts] to Sarcee's [ts, ts, č]. While the corresponding [ts]'s in the first series suggest Proto-Athabaskan *ts, it is unclear whether to reconstruct *č or *ts for the second or the third series; and in any case, another consonant will still be required to distinguish among them. If one did not believe in the regularity of sound change, one might simply conclude that there is no systematic correspondence in these consonants between Navaho and Sarcee (other than a negative one that [č] never matches).

  As to the identity of the source, I'll leave that for the interested reader to figure out, with or without the aid of Google book search.
• This reminds me that I've also been tagged by the polyglot conspirator, L. M. Squires, to do the "five things my readers don't know about me" meme. (The previous sentence assumes that the passage of a year does not trigger any statute of limitations on either the tagging or the present perfect tense.) It's hard to pin down what "my readers don't know," because the few of them who know me in real life know quite a bit more than the many who don't, since I don't tend to post much personal information here. So I'll interpret this as something more along the lines of "five odd facts about me":
  1. I've never lived anywhere I could vote (so I've always voted by absentee ballot).
  2. I cannot talk and play a musical instrument at the same time (and I play mostly stringed instruments, not winds).
  3. The last time I had a haircut was in 1989 (or possibly as late as 1990).
  4. I have read every play Henrik Ibsen wrote, many of them during computer science lectures in the first year of my undergraduate degree.
  5. The highest mark I received as an undergraduate was in a computer science course (but I decided to major in linguistics anyway, rather than comp sci or Norwegian literature).
• And, speaking of memes, both tahnan (in this post) and Heidi Harley have recently done the album meme. One concocts an album cover as follows:
  1. The name of the band is the title of a random Wikipedia article.
  2. The title of the album is the last four words of the last quotation on a page of randomly chosen quotations.
  3. The cover art is the third image in a sampling of photos recently designated "interesting" on Flickr.
  When I tried this, the Wikipedia article I got was about an actual band, so my album cover lacks the pure speculative whimsy of some of the others. It did mean, though, that I could draw on one of their actual album covers as inspiration for the layout of my apocryphal one. And I do like the combination of title and image that I ended up with:

  

If you think that it would be fun to do any of the memes in this post, consider yourself tagged.