Schizophrenia By Invitation

I don't want to wade into the Mac vs. PC debate, but I think iTunes is becoming one of the best bloody things you can use a computer for.

Even with the media player features to one side, the volume of stuff you can get at through it as a portal is immense, and while yes, theoretically, this stuff would be available on the internet anyway, the accessibility of information, music and video is awesome.

Case in hand, and the cause of all this technogushing, is the 'Education' section of the podcasts library.
I'm up to Lesson 11 (of 26) of a radio language learning course offered by Deutsche Welle. It's really good, completely free, and bizarre enough to get me to pay attention. So I'm learning some German...for free.

Which while rather grand-sounding, means that right now I'm up on basic German telephone vocabulary, ordering coffee and tea, and the social position of invisible elves in modern Germany.

That sounds like a joke, but it isn't - the lessons are set, like many good language lessons before them, in a hotel. Unlike most of my high school language teaching materials, however, the porter has an invisible elf friend who speaks a good three octaves higher than he does but who still manages to make everyone who hears her think it's the porter being cheeky and talking in the informal to pompous hotel guests. Also one of the lessons consisted almost entirely of the narrator telling the story -in English- of how the elf leapt out of a book.
Up until that point I had been imagining a little fluttering fairy in the vein of Tinkerbell, but there was a sound effect of heavy feet landing when the elf jumped out of the book, so now when I listen to the lessons I imagine a whopping great six-foot-six elven warrior straight out of The Battle For Helm's Deep, complete with armour, pike, and longbow, mincing around behind a hotel desk asking very basic German questions in a quavering falsetto.

So if, as Charlemagne said (and several quotation website assure me that he did), that to gain another language is to gain another soul, I have to wonder what sort of batshit insane person I am by degrees allowing to take up residence in my head.