The National Spelling Bee is across the street, as usual. The twist this year?

There are protestors.

The idiocy is that English's mongrel background is precisely why it's a superior language to write, think and shout in! Let's let Salon break it down, in the context of the Sotomayor vetting process:

But most ridiculous of all is the idea that something is not "natural" in English. In all the world, there is no more mongrel or polyglot tongue than English; no language more gleefully willing to taint its purity. English borrows from every other language with abandon, steals "foreign" vocabulary without remorse, scoffs at any and every linguistic boundary. Such free-and-easy kaleidoscopic adaptability is English's great strength. Hey, gringo! Why are you so gung-ho to get rid of the chandeliers and blitzkriegs?

Well spelled.

It begins.

This story about Sotomayor's, er, taste is too crazy to believe.

Bolton said the source was drawing, "a deductive link," between Sotomayor's thoughts on Puerto Rican food and her other statements. And I guess the chain goes something like this: 1). Sotomayor implied that her Latina identity informs her jurisprudence, 2). She also implied that Puerto Rican cuisine is a crucial part of her Latina identity, 3). Ergo, her gastronomical proclivities will be a non-negligible factor for her when she's considering cases before the Supreme Court.

Insane!

No pix uploaded yet to share. But if you're interested in determining a unique identity based on location data then this website describing a new paper might be interesting to you:

Philippe Golle and Kurt Partridge of PARC have a cute paper (pdf) on the anonymity of geo-location data. They analyze data from the U.S. Census and show that for the average person, knowing their approximate home and work locations — to a block level — identifies them uniquely.

In the words of Tilda, "so what?"