Random Notes: Origins of Hogwash, Tracks On Snow, Warm Young Fingers, And Überzeugen

Notes I've made in the last couple of days.  None is long enough for a post on its own.  

1.   I noticed that a few people have been finding their way to my post on the origins of hogwash in the last few days, but I didn't really take notice until I got this one:

(Yes, you do leave lots of tracks when you surf the internet.  Some people leave more tracks than others.  This is just part of what you leave.  Proxy servers help hide your tracks and there are other ways that probably will become more important in the future when government and other tracking will become more problematic.)

2.  Wow! The Alaska Dispatch News has a new online viewer and the pages don't randomly skip from here to there as I try to scroll down the story.  Now they scroll smoothly up and down like every other page.  Good move, about time.

3.  What a joy when your 3 year old granddaughter takes your hand in her warm soft fingers as you walk down the street.

4.  I was enjoying the wonderful resources for translation online these days while working on a synopsis of an Austrian film - Planet Ottakring - that's in competition at the Anchorage International Film Festival.  While I was checking my choice of the word 'eager' (not quite right) for überzeugt when this sentence popped up which seemed very appropriate for the times.

A number of sites now give lists of sentences with the word you are looking up so you can see how it's used in different contexts.   From http://en.bab.la/dictionary/german-english/ueberzeugter:

überzeugen [überzeugte |überzeugt ] {v.i.}
to satisfy [satisfied|satisfied] (be convincing) {v.i 

Example sentence:
Ich entscheide hiermit, dass die Abstimmung zu überprüfen ist, damit sich alle davon überzeugen können, dass das Ergebnis tatsächlich so ausgefallen ist. 

Translated sentence:
My decision is that the vote will be checked in order to satisfy everyone that that indeed was the result. 

5.  We got back last night from Seattle in time to see that our housesitter had nicely cleared our driveway of snow.  With a south facing inclined driveway, it's helpful to keep snow from building up. Otherwise, with vehicle tracks in the driveway pressing down the snow followed by freeze and thaw cycles, we get a treacherously icy driveway that is tricking to walk up and down.

This morning we woke up to about four new inches of snow.  I like shoveling snow and so I did before J drove off to do errands and left compressed snow tracks in the driveway.  It was still snowing  - almost like drizzling salt size pellets - so after I got the driveway and sidewalk and around my car in the street, there was a thin dusting of new snow.  I swept away some of it.  What you see on the right is the track J left on the swept and not swept snow.













6.  The Anchorage International Film Festival begins tomorrow night at the Bear Tooth.  My tab at the top left under the orange heading organizes all my posts on the festival and what's happening.