popplers

Tuesday quickies!

• Microcars!
• Wisconsin "weather": hatch of mayflies so thick that it showed up on radar. (I expect that you would have seen similar patterns in the Adirondacks last week due to massive clouds of no-see-ums and angry blackflies. I have a blackfly bite on my ankle and it still itches.)
• Nifty "3-D" crop circle found in Oxfordshire, England.
• This week's On Language column in the NYT explores parts of speech and "functional shifting"— the nouning of verbs, the verbing of nouns, etc. Bonus fifty-cent word: anthimeria. Quoth the inimitable Madeleine Page: "Hang your burnished head in shame, you language slaughterer, you egregious verbifier of stout nouns. Stoppage of such linguistic mauling is required forthwith. Reformationing, in short, is demandfully requiremented."