Outside the Beltway

Jason Kottke points me to Stan Carey’s summary of Jack Grieve’s study of regional variations in swearing patterns across the United States.

A trailer for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox using dialogue from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

Richard Quinn, a business professor at the University of Central Florida, got suspicious after a historically high grade distribution on the midterm for his capstone course and decided to scare his students.

If you’re like me, you think of William Shakespeare’s plays as being rendered in an archaic but decidedly upper crust British English. It turns out that this is an artifact of modern theater.

Lots of jobs that existed in recent memory — secretaries, travel agents, gas station attendants, cashiers — have been replaced by technology. The middle class may be disappearing with them.

Christopher Walken does a dramatic reading of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” recycles a Steve Allen bit from before I was born. But it’s still hilarious.