Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

31 Oct 2004, 20:56 p.m.

An Ad For Canadian Schooling

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2004 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

If you ever visit my putative homepage, and you're viewing the page with graphics turned on, you'll see a bit of Russian at the bottom. "Ya mogu yest steklo; eto menya ne vredit," it says. This is a rare lie on my part. It means, "I can eat glass; it doesn't hurt me." A stray thought by some bored Internetter led to the I Can Eat Glass Project web fad, an attempt to translate this phrase into as many languages as possible and publish the results.

Another phrase of this sort is "my hovercraft is full of eels", deriving from a Monty Python sketch about a really bad Hungarian-English phrasebook. Today, whilst reading the really fun Gordon Korman book Son of the Mob [2]: Hollywood Hustle, a line jumped out at me:

...isn't the most romantic place in the world. But this is Willow. She could raise your heart rate in a hovercraft full of eels. She almost makes me forget that...

And a few pages later:

Maybe in Dad's mind, he can lie and tell the truth at the same time, just the way light can simultaneously be both a wave and a particle.

Gordon, you keep surprising me.