Late Night Amusement - Russian Spam

I get the best Russian spam late at night these days - somehow it's evading both of my spam filters - but instead of deleting it, I'm using it as a chance to brush up on my reading in Russian. And the messages are a great combination of really basic words that I know, complex words that I'm able to discern meaning from given a basic understanding of spam, and cognates, which are always fun.

Yeah, so I have better things to do with my time and reading short stories or Russian newspapers would probably be better training, but this way I get a little every day to keep those neurons active in preparation for Sochi 2014. If you are interested in any great Russian spam, just drop me a line - I'd be happy to forward...

RIP Arthur Clarke, One of Sci-Fi's Greatest

He turned Jupiter into a second sun and now he's gone. At age 90, one of science fiction's greatest, Arthur C. Clarke, has died. He passed his last years in Sri Lanka, this Brit served in the Royal Air Force in WWII, survived polio, designed preliminary modern satellites, and wrote classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey. That's quite a life.

The Washington Post has a nice write-up, and Space.com wrote about the industry response. USA Today covers his body of work in impressive detail.

I recall vividly the first time I read 2001: A Space Odyssey the realism of his ideas and how they affected me. He was a visionary. Arthur C. Clarke will be missed, but not forgotten, with 80 books and 500 essays.