Observing the Effect of Gestures in Africa

HT: EN

Merry Christmas today...

...to our Ethiopian friends! 

Lost Parakeet Piko Tells Police Its Own Address

Talking animals are linguistically intriguing. Here's a story from Japan about a talking parakeet found and returned to its owner because it told the police its address!

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(HT: Dad)

The Most Expensive Coffee in the World

While we studied French, we met a woman from the Philippines studying with us who familiarized us with this rare, expensive coffee.  According to Amusingplanet.com,

Kopi luwak, the world’s most expensive coffee, is made from a certain variety of wild red coffee beans but only after it has passed through the digestive track of the Asian Palm Civet. The berries which grow in Indonesia and Philippines are eaten by the civet, a weasel-like animal, who likes the berries for their flesh. But they can't digest the inner beans which come out as poop.

Update: For the Thailand version of this, 22 Words just posted about elephant dung coffee selling for $500/pound, about the same that civet-dung-coffee sold for a few years ago.

Le Zouk in Africa

It's a style of music with origins in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and other parts of the world, and this reggae-like music is enjoyed all over the world, mostly in francophone areas. In Yaoundé recently they had a huge Zouk concert, and this week, a friend of ours mentioned that he enjoys le Zouk. Wikipedia explains:

Zouk is a style of rhythmic music originating from the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Zouk means "party" or "festival" in the local Antillean Creole of French, although the word originally referred to, and is still used to refer to, a popular dance, based on the Polish dance, the mazurka, that was introduced to the French Caribbean in the 19th Century.^[1] In Africa, it is popular in franco- and lusophone countries. In Europe it is particularly popular in France, and in North America the Canadian province of Quebec.

Lord of the Rings Series

So, over the time of the next three weeks or so, we are watching Lord of the Rings in French (Le Seigneur Des Anneaux) with some friends!  We are super excited to relearn the world in this way, as this is one of our favorite movie series but we have never watched them in French.