The Lexicographer's Rules

"The large bird ingestion test shall be conducted using one bird of a weight determined from Table 1 aimed at the most critical exposed location on the first stage rotor blades and ingested at a bird speed of 200-knots for engines to be installed on airplanes, or the maximum airspeed for normal rotorcraft flight operations for engines to be installed on rotorcraft."

—Federal Aviation Administration. Section 33.76, Part 33, Airworthiness Standards: Aircraft Engines, Subpart EÑDesign and Construction; Turbine Aircraft Engines. Summary: All airplane engines must be tested for their ability to handle the ingestion of birds, dead or alive. (Found via Your Pocket

Guide). '

"Winnipeg is a Siberia, a skagway, a vast plain of ice. Its only hill is a mountain of garbageÑ50 years' worth of civilian refuseÑwhich in the winter children use for toboggan sliding. But sledding can be dangerous, for from this hill the permafrost pushes up odd items buried by our ancestors; I was once impaled there by the very same stag antlers my father had thrown out two decades earlier."

—Village Voice. In Winnipeg, Guy Maddin tells with charm and bite a curious story, centering around how he smuggled a Super-8 camera onto the set of an Osmonds movie to film his own $500 version of the $5 million movie. '

"What with the homogenizing effects of globalization on the one hand and the loss of their empire on the other, the English have become more and more like other people and less like what used to be themselves. The inveterately high-minded, do-gooding English spinster, as well as the buttoned-up pukka sahib, are pretty much gone from the scene; the habit of emotional restraint has disappeared along with the coal fires whose heat never really penetrated the damp and drafty rooms they were supposed to warm. The English have exchanged their world dominance for a fashion sense, some decent restaurants and a new colony on Broadway."

—New York Times. Jeremy Paxman's book The English jumps aboard the-English-way-we-were wagon but says the idea that the idea of Englishness always ''excluded most of the population from the identity with which they had been born.''

"I understand that many of the people present had lived in the neighborhood for yearsÑeven decadesÑand saw the hotel as one more agonizing sign of the area's appeal to obnoxious strangers 'standing outside, yakking on their cell phones at one in the morning,' as one woman put it. Of course, I happen to be one of the people they probably hate to see moving in. I work for an Internet company. I pay too much for a small studio. I eat at trendy restaurants. And since the hotelÕs restaurant will be run by the same people who started Indochine and Bond StreetÑum, yeah, itÕs likely IÕll be a patron, cell phone and all."

—New York Observer. Deirdre Shaw attends a public meeting about a new hotel going up on her street, expecting the angry, the blowhards, those who resist changeÑand getting a full dose. "They were a wild band of NIMBY vigilantes, the type of obnoxious white liberals who wear berets and ponytails and feel it's their duty to protest anything trendy, which they were above, or anything that makes money, which they were apparently also above."'

"So that phrase—Thinking out of the box—it's supposed to connote, presumably, a need to think 'fresh,' think 'new,' think, dare we say, 'different,' yes? But, um, no. Seeing as how most good ideas don't spring forth from thin air, after all; standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. Leaves me cold. So I'm a proponent for thinking inside the box�and maybe figuring out what's wrong, there in the box, determining what needs to be added, discarded, improved, enhanced. Making a difference there, in our little box."

—Monstro. Lane Becker rejects a buzz phrase with vigor. "And don't even get me started on 'It's a small world.' No, it isn't. It's a huge world, gigantic, circular, and that's why running into you is such a coincidence!"'