Friday, October 22, 2010

Christmas all year

Christmas is primarily a Christian festival. But for many people, Christmas is simply a celebration of love and family, regardless of their faith and their religion. Even the period before Christmas is for many very thoughtful and comfortable. The apartments will be festively decorated, and all are preparing for Christmas. Many people get now consider the Christmas gifts and what they in Christmas want dish of culinary delights. At Christmas, then usually meets the whole family and enjoy a Banquet. But Christmas is also a time of stress. Finally, many preparations have to be and to do shopping.

storm, especially on the days just before Christmas Eve, people in the business, many are still in search of the last gifts. The real reason for Christmas is here, unfortunately, mostly forgotten. The children look forward to their Gifts and the adults on the delicious food. Meanwhile, however, many people flee the hustle and bustle of Christmas and would rather spend this time on holiday. Since the Christmas holidays are yes, of course, offers a family vacation as well as Christmas gift. Many German spend the holidays and the Christmas season abroad, but often you get to hear then "there is no place like home." No matter where and how to celebrate Christmas for many is the finest and most comfortable time of year. Often these contemplative season is used to time vesammeln again the whole family at a table. It's at Christmas is not always just about the gifts, but the generally bask sense of community. In many families it is still tradition to go to church at Christmas. Even a visit to a Christmas Market is part of the Christmas season as mulled wine.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Personality Websites

So you checked. You don’t suffer from halitosis, no body odour problems, and you’re not even bad-looking , but you just can’t seem to make any breakthrough with people at social gatherings. Why? Well, it’s probably because you’re bad at conversations. You don’t know where to begin, and when you do, you mostly don’t have anything interesting to say.

Mostly, you’re the person nursing a drink at the periphery of a party conversation, nodding sagely, at least that’s the look you’ve been going for so far. But why stand at the edge when you can be bang in the middle of all the action; holding court, narrating anecdotes, and generally just appearing well-informed on anything and everything.

Here are seven websites, equipped with which, you can appear intelligent to almost anyone. Well, not everyone, but at least it’s a start...

www.thefreedictionary.com
This resource is one of the best places in Cyberia for any information of any sort. Besides dictionaries in English and 13 other languages, the site boasts of a thesaurus, a section for abbreviations, idioms, an encyclopaedia, as well as a literature reference library, and all supported by a nifty search engine.

Daily visitors can also expect regular features such as word of the day, quote of the day, article of the day, this day in history, and so on. But my personal favourite has got to be the word game section, which includes Hangman and Spelling Bee. But I digress. Equipped with this resource, you can wax eloquent on practically anything under the sun.

www.acronymfinder.com
Every now and then, someone might try to appear smarter by spewing out an acronym or abbreviation at you with a condescending smirk. But if you have bookmarked Acronym Finder in you browser, that’s one less tactic they can use to make you feel stupid.

Now, while it won’t keep you informed about everything there is to know, at least it will help you mitigate your losses. This site has more than 7,50,000 ‘human-edited’ definitions, abbreviations and acronyms about computers, technology, telecommunications, and the military. So bookmark it ASAP before people start ROTFL at your ignorance.


www.etymonline.com
This site is all about polishing you into a fairly decent wordsmith. You know you can’t have a conversation without being equipped with the right linguistic skills. Also, it always helps to know the root of words so you don’t trip while trying to appear smart. Enter Etymonline.

This resource will help you understand the origin, development, and the ‘true sense’ of a word. In simpler language, if you need to know the basis of any word in English, then this is the place to go to. Heck, it even covers “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” . You might want to look that one up while you’re at it.


www.biography.com
Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people . But how will you ever discuss people, if you know nothing about them? I suggest you make haste to this resource. Whether it’s Pope or Martin Luther King, or , Genghis Khan or the Great, Princess Diana or, you’ll find all their biographies here; complete with photographs, videos snippets, etcetera. And on those nights when you don’t have any social invites, visit Biography.com anyway. It definitely makes for interesting reading.

wolframalpha.com
How do I put this mildly without sounding like a fanboy? Wolframalpha is a with a difference. Enter your birth date as a search parameter, and the engine will throw up details like the number of years, months and days you have spent on this planet; famous personalities that were born on the same day; the phase of the moon on the day you were born, etc.

Enter in a colour, say ‘pink’, and it will throw up its RGB value, its hexadecimal code, complementary colours and the like. But don’t take my word for it, go on, type in Mumbai and Tokyo in the box, and see what you get. Useless facts and statistics can be a great conversation opener.

www.pantheon.org
Everyone likes a story, and mythology has always a good subject to mine for conversations . So for your fill of gods and demons, check out Pantheon.org and Theoi.com; both excellent places to start. While the latter only covers Grecian divinity (and does it exceedingly well), Pantheon includes mythological characters from across the globe: From our own Ganesha to the Greek Zeus, the Roman Jupiter to the Nordic Freya, from the Egyptian Anubis to the Aztec Quetzalcoatl.

The gods, it seems, have made these two URLs their personal domain. So if the exploits of the gods has always been your Achilles’ heel, then this site is your river Styx.


www.brainyquote.com
So you’ve tried a few Siddhuisms, and you’ve managed to get a few guffaws out of your soft-headed friends. But now it’s time to up the ante. If you’re looking to impress people with higher IQs than your cronies, you must take recourse to BrainyQuote.

The site is a repository of quotations from humourists, playwrights, presidents, authors, humanitarians and practically everybody who is anybody. Like someone famous said and I don’t remember who, but you’ll probably find the quote on the site itself: “Next to being witty, the best thing is being able to quote another’s wit”.