Since taglines are oh-so-important and so utterly pithy and positively oozing with meaning, I thought it appropriate to spend a bit of time thinking about mine. Because, you know, with a name like ‘mixed nuts’ a blog can so easily be confused with, say, a laundry list and it’s so very important that you explain that it isn’t.

So our search for clever little taglines for our blogs threw up the following for mine:

1. Smarter than the average nut
2. More nuts than you can shake a stick at
3. Because you’re worth it
4. My imagination is more than a match for your reality
5. Nuts eat dementors for breakfast
6. The premium choice for sophisticated hunter-gatherers
7. Evisceration is best done on a cool day
8. Mixed nuts are happy nuts

I’m quite partial to number 3 simply because it’s so beautifully inane. 4 and 7 come from my journals. They’re true, too. Don’t ask. 1,2, and 5 are similar to ‘mixed nuts are happy nuts’ (which Ameel came up with and I quite like) and don’t really say much at all, which is good. As for number 6, the more I look at it, the less I like it. Hmm. Since so much hangs in the balance, I think I’ll simply avoid a decision and cycle through the lot. Hey it gives me something to do while I try to write something worth writing.

The fantastic Kyla Pasha has put up a few recordings of her reading three of her poems. I can’t decide which is my favorite although I can tell you right now that I wish I’d written all three. Go have a listen and tell her what you think.

The Urdu Poetry Archive is probably the most comprehensive Urdu poetry site I’ve come across so far. It contains over 1,800 poems by about 343 poets and has an alphabetical listing of both, which makes it easy to locate whatever you’re looking for. It hasn’t been updated for a few years though and I hope it hasn’t been abandoned – it’s a fantastic resource and, since the poems are transliterated (according to a painstakingly uniform system that it’s worth your while to get to know), people who speak urdu but have trouble with the script can still access the poetry. There aren’t any translations up though, but I suppose that would be a whole other project.

If you’ve ever wondered why our voices go up a few octaves and become distinctly sing-song-y when we talk to children (and yes, even a misanthrope like me does on occasion talk to children), Professor Steve Jones may have an answer.

And thereby hangs a tale; for rhythm is essential to language. Children pick up the pulse of speech well after they have learned its vocabulary and grammar. That explains in part why they sound childish and why adults talk to them in such an embarrassing way. The young pick up trochees first (which is why “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” – a perfect example of the form – is so popular and may even lie behind Shakespeare’s use of the same rhythm for the child-like figure of Puck). An ability to respond to the ponderous iamb takes much longer to emerge. When faced with a complicated word like “banana”, infants often turn it into a tasty trochee, or “nana”.

We’ve been kicking around the idea of adding a blog to the site because it’s just more convenient than uploading entire pages each time I write a new paragraph. Admittedly, it’s not that many pages but hey, if I can do something in two clicks instead of three, I’m happy. So we finally did it (or rather I very generously offered to take out the trash while Ameel got it all organized and installed) and here I am with my shiny new blog all set to go. Ameel will be setting his up shortly too so do check back for it.