For my Serenity-philes out there

In addition the revered Pinyinary, take a look at this site: On-line Chinese Tools

The author has a clever 'Chinese namer' with sound clips, and a tool to get the correct nomenclature for family relationships, as calling each other by name is improper (although 'Captain Tightpants' might be out of spec as well).

Idle hurricane post

I just sent the following e-mail off to the U.N. organisation in charge of hurricane name lists:

Dear sirs and madams,

Considering the recent prolific activity of the Atlantic hurricane season, I wish you would consider including the missing letters of the English-Roman alphabet -- Q, U, X, Y and Z -- into our lists. Obviously you have name pools to draw from, as evinced by the Eastern North Pacific lists. I'm sure we could share, considering how unlikely it is the same name could occur on both sides of the continent at the same time (due to the alternating genders).

For instance:
Qadir      Qamar
Quentin    Queen
Quigley    Quenby
Quincy     Quon
Quinlan    Qadira
Quinn      Querida
Qadim      Qamra
Qingyuan   Qubilah

Transliterated Arabic and Chinese use 'Q' in Roman alphabet to represent some of their particular phonemes.

Ursula     Uriel
Uta        Ulysses
Umbriel    Upton
Ulla       Ulric
Uhura      Udell
Urania     Uriah
Undine     Umberto
Usagi      Urban

German and Indian name origins are particularly rich fields for 'U' names.

I hope you will take these lists into consideration.

Thank you,

[boring mundane name and location so they can tell I think about hurricanes a lot]

Those last couple 'Q' names were a pain! (Drat, I meant to alphabetise that before sending... oh well.)


Living in MIA final approach, I keep getting this sort of weird feeling every time I hear an aeroplane overhead right now -- 'They're not coming back....'


P.S.:  Alpha is a himicane.