We’ve had 40 Fridays so far in 2008. I’ve been playing the ONCE lottery every week so far this year. In my complex simulation that gave predictions of the outcome, I predicted that at the end of the third quarter, I would have either 85€ or 90€. Well, guess what? My [...]

When you are studying Spanish, it’s not until you get to the stage where you are reading trying to comprehend articles from a Spanish newspaper that you first encounter the bizarre acronym EEUU. It sounds like something you might exclaim when you catch a whiff of a foul odor. The truth is that: [...]

The Onion has absolutely nailed my feelings on the US Presidential election.
“While you are 100 percent certain that your preferred candidate’s stance on issues such as foreign policy and the economy would appeal to any human being with half a brain, there is, in this very same country, an equally large voting bloc which believes [...]

Occasionally, as a native English speaker living in Spain, I come across words or situations that make me laugh because they have another meaning in the other language. Today was one of those days. Believe it or not, I had never considered the double Spanglish meaning of the Spanish word pie, meaning “foot”. [...]

What follows are some photos I took with my iPhone this Saturday. In the morning, I played golf with my friend Manolo. He picked me up at 8:15 and we were back at 14:35. In those six hours and twenty minutes, we only had time to play 13 holes, stopping short to [...]

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Vote_Carlson_Leonard_2008′;Watching some Simpsons the other day, it hit me what presidential morph I should do next. I’ve already morphed McCain into Palin and Obama into Biden. Now it’s time to go a little cartoony. What better black guy and white guy to morph Obama and Biden into than Carl and [...]

Today I’m going to share a little joke that my father-in-law tells every time someone makes the clichéd comment of “No, I can’t go to [wherever], you’ll have to drink my drink for me.” It’s a pretty good joke. When you retell it, you should change the foreign land and the drinks ordered [...]

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Can_Sarah_Palin_really_see_Russia_from_her_house’;Any intelligent person knows that Sarah Palin was joking when she said that she could see Russia from her house. It’s pure hyperbole. But everyone in the media keeps repeating it over and over, and I’m certain that some people probably actually believe it to be true. I bet that [...]

One of the things I love about living in a foreign country immersed in a foreign language, is that sometimes your minimal understandings of things leads you to draw conclusions that, in retrospect are humorously idiotic, but that, at the time, seemed perfectly reasonable. Here I provide two of my favorite anecdotal instances.

I suppose my parents get the credit or blame for my feeling about loans. The only actual tidbit of wisdom I recall receiving was “If you pay extra every month on your mortgage, in the long run, you pay less interest and you save money.” Owing money to someone makes me feel bad. [...]