Groan

Just came across one of the worse jokes ever, a real groaner. So I thought I share it with you and challenge you to come up with an even worse one:

One day, Rudolph the Red, the infamous Russian Tsar, is having his breakfast with his wife. When he looks outside he notices some precipitation, so he says to his wife: "Look dear, it is raining." His wife looks out of the window and replies: "I am sorry to disagree with you, but I think that is snow." A small domestic arises, so they decide to go outside and check, and what do you know, it turns out the tsar was right in the first place. Triumphantly he turns to his wife and says: "Now you know Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear."

(If you don't get it, try reading the last sentence out loud.)

Spelling

Have you ever done one of those spelling competitions? Well I currently feel like I am in one continually. I am learning Tibetan and that has so far turned out to be harder than I hoped for. One of the things I have been struggling with is the spelling. I am now slowly getting the hang of it, but it is still hard. Let me give you a little taste: the syllable in the picture above here is pronounced something like: "jee", but when spelling it out it is pronounced something like: "ba sagado garado ja gigu ji gasa jee". Each bit spells out a bit of the syllable and it means something like: "ba (the first letter) and sa (the top of the stacked letters) on top of ga (the middle of the stacked letters) becomes ga on top of ra (the bottom of the stacked letters) becomes ja with a gigu (the accent, which is really a vowel) becomes ji followed by ga (the third letter) and sa (the last letter) becomes jee". I am not entirely sure what this word means (it seems to be something like 'to arrange' according to my online dictionary), but it is an example of one of the more complex syllables, so I thought it would make a good example.

Please note that the romanisation I have used here is only very approximate as some of the sounds (and especially the tones) in Tibetan are not easily romanised.