Spring is here

This nice spring afternoon I saw...


















Henry Hedgehog on his stroll,



















a lot of life under the willow,



















the duck family,



















...and the obligatory cherry blossom.

Quiz for Earth Day

As you already know 22nd April is Earth Day. To celebrate the event, I added a few more questions and explanations to last year's quiz and took it up a notch in user-friendliness with an online quiz maker. Now you don't need to open the key in another window you just have to click through the quiz and your answers will be corrected. When you have finished doing it you will be given a certificate, which you can share on Facebook or on other social networking sites.

Quiz for Earth Day » Quiz Creator

At the dentist

Over the past few weeks I have been visiting the dentist's surgery way too often. A filling here, a bit of scaling there, but most of the 'smaller repairs' were neither too dangerous nor too painful. That was until three days ago when I had my impacted wisdom tooth removed. Now, that was a completely different matter: sheer agony during the two-hour surgery and a slow, painful recovery ever since. Fortunately, I feel better now and I have just found this Eddie Izzard video on youtube. It superbly describes my overall experience and general feeling about dentists and dentistry. Good job, I have only found it now, three days after the surgery. Now, Eddie has had me in stitches. Had I found the video earlier, I might have laughed out my stitches.

The tail of the tale or the tale of the tail?

Recently, I had to write a long text in English and when I went through it before sending it (I always have to double-check my spelling) I came across an old mistake of mine, which I thought I had managed to get rid of over the years. The mistake was the good old see-sea homophone mix up. Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelt differently and mean completely different things. The two (or sometimes more) words do sound exactly the same and when I(*_) write (right?) I automatically say the things I'm writing so sometimes I confuse things a bit. Even the inbuilt spell-checks cannot correct these things because the pairs of the homophones (see-sea, war-wore, write-right, sale-sail...) are both in the dictionary.














(picture from here)

Have you read Alice in Wonderland? Do you remember the "Mouse's tale" ? In the story the mouse says: "Mine is a long and a sad tale!" Alice thinks the mouse means a 'sad tail' and she is very surprised. So, Lewis Caroll had to come up with a nice, long, winding tail-poem. It seems that homophone mix-ups do have their uses, after all.


Do you find anything strange with the following sentences? Can you correct the mistakes in them?

Yesterday she died her hair.
Have you bought the meet?
There car is bigger than ours.
She stepped on the break but the car didn't stop.
Witch one is your watch?
The whether is awful today.
Piece, brother!
You have very week mussels!
Sir Robin is a very brave night.
That's hour house, over there.

(You can find the key here.)

The Mad Hatter's riddle

Watch this video to find out why a raven is like a writing desk.