Thoughtful Links

From Going Like Sixty:
"The phones are recycled and the money is used to buy phone cards for troops. It’s a helluva a project started by a couple teenagers! The vast majority of phones in the United States are temporarily stashed in junk drawers and storage closets before ultimately being discarded – contributing a staggering 13,750 tons of unused cell phones to landfills every year. A mobile phone contains toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury, cadmium, and beryllium, and hazardous chemicals, such as brominated flame retardants (BFR) which can cause birth defects. Not only will recycling help the environment, it will help the troops."...

From Alan Little's Weblog:
"German-speakers plan their speeches more carefully than we do. Before you launch into one of those long sentences with the verb at the end you have to know where you’re going! This doesn’t mean you have to have every word planned out in detail before you launch into a German sentence, but you do have to be confident that you can somehow or other make your way back around to that trailing verb. Something like Sonata Form in music, where eventually, whatever you do in between, you have to make your way back to a recapitulation of the original theme. And Sonata Form is a quintessentially German art. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. So: Sonata Form mirrors the grammatical structure of a German sentence? Why not? People talk about Janacek’s music as mirroring the spoken rhythms of the Czech language.”

From Authorblog:
"An Austrian man ended up in hospital after he faked an armed robbery because he was too scared to tell his wife he had lost thousands of dollars in a casino. The man, 26, broke his nose, jaw and arm as he beat himself with an iron bar to make the fake robbery seem authentic. But he eventually confessed in hospital."