Weekend Time-Wasters

I was going to get something productive done on this blog over the weekend, but I got caught up in some wonderful little online detours instead. First, when I was checking my SiteMeter stats, I found that someone had come to The Musings through the Spanish-language version of Google. They checked out my review of the One O'Clock's concert with Benny Golson from almost exactly two years ago. The Google listing also gave the option of translating my post into Spanish, so did so and was quite amused by the results.

One thing led to another, and suddenly I was translating all kinds of things into Spanish (I got a kick out of the UNT Jazz site done that way, among other things). From there, I started checking out other translation possibilities, and the chance to translate something into Swedish Chef led me to The Dialectizer, which translates websites or blocks of text into various dialects, including Elmer Fudd, Redneck, Jive and Hacker, as well as the aforementioned Swedish Chef. (We found Fudd and Hacker to be the most amusing, for what it's worth.) At any rate, click those links only if you want to be amused and have a bit of time to kill.

This wasn't just a game:: Patrons camped outside a Wal-Mart in Connecticut (waiting to buy a PS3, of course) were attacked by robbers who demanded money; one man who refused to give them cash was shot.

They finally got the Christmas spirit: The Marine Reserves' Toys for Tots program in L.A. decided to accept the donation of 4,000 talking Jesus dolls after initially refusing to do so.