The language tree and the Nordic cats

I have always been fascinated by language. I came across this tree and an illustration of how one language in the same geographic area as a few others that have much in common turned out to have emerged from a completely separate branch. What this and the other languages in the area have in common amounts to nothing, zilch, nada, rien, niente and so on...

Happy birthday, Spike!

I hope Spike makes it to her birthday party...

There's a lot of icing on this cake!

Spike is known for having many, many cats:

And for growing yummy stuff:

Remember Spike's book of farts? The drum rolls? The Chinese fireworks?

We can have the usual array of pretty cupcakes:

Let's all help ourselves to a variety of drinks!

Cheers, Spike! Have a great day!

Super cute story

A dad from County Durham, in the north of England, helped his five year-old daughter write a letter to the police chief after a conversation about police dogs.

Eliza must have been really happy when she received this:

Chief Constable Michael Barton is a nice guy, don't you think?

Cartoons to make you laugh or make you think

Argentinian illustrator and cartoonist Marcos Severi creates cartoons and images that may be funny, poetic, even serious, but some of them are thought provoking.

"Teach me to love?"

This little girl is an oil painting

I don't know if the expression "she's no oil painting" is used in the US, meaning plain or unattractive. This gorgeous little girl, however, IS an oil painting. She's the daughter of talented Australian photographer Bill Gekas. He has a knack to make photographs look and feel like classical paintings. Enjoy!

All aboard... let's fly!

These satellite photos were collected by Benjamin Grant in a study to illustrate the impact humans have on nature, seen from an unusual viewpoint. We're going to take a breathtaking tour around the world:

1. Valparaiso, Chile

2. Tulip fields, Netherlands

3. Melrose Park, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

 4. Complicated road system, just outside Madrid, Spain

5. Snails Pass, in the Andes, on the Chilean side of the border with Argentina

6. Blue evaporation ponds at a potash mine in Moab, Utah

7. Makati City, one of the 16 cities that constitute Manilla, capital of The Philippines 

8. Bourtange is a star shaped fort in the Netherlands 

9. The Grande Dixence dam in Switzerland is the highest gravity dam in the world, at 935 feet

10. Agricultural development in Austria

11. New data reveals that China burns 17% more coal each year

12. L'Eixample district of Valencia, in Spain

13. Victoria Falls, on the Zambezi river, between Zambia and Zimbabwe

14. The village of Espel in the Netherlands is home to 774 inhabitants

 15. Oil field service ships sit off the coast of Borneo

16. Nishinoshima is a volcanic island 940km south of Tokyo, Japan

17. We finish our tour in Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia