Babel and Beliefs en This user is a native speaker of the English language. This user knows that 42 is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. This user always looks on the bright side of life! 4 This user thinks BBC Radio 4 is worth the licence fee alone. This user does not appreciate tobacco smoke.

Hello and welcome to my page. I'm expanding it with a few pretty userboxes of, at the moment, a non-polemical nature and having discovered just how cool some of the pictures of the day are that's here too.

I'm a budding amateur on Wikipedia and generally I just correct things that I notice are wrong or read badly when browsing through, e.g. typos. I also add little bits of knowledge where I can and update articles where needed. I also like to have my say in deletion discussions etc.. I'm beginning to branch out into writing articles from scratch but, with over a million on here, I struggle to find things that aren't covered and that I might have a slim chance of understanding were I to research them.

If you disagree with anything I've written then please do say although if there's anything controversial I'll more than likely have written about it on the relevant discussion page. Or you could just write me a note to say hello. You could even write it in a different language to help me expand on my pathetic linguistic ability - I only have it up there to put myself to shame in the hope that I do something about it.

Picture of the day

Lake Estancia was a prehistoric body of water in the Estancia Valley, in the center of the U.S. state of New Mexico. Mostly fed by creek and groundwater from the Manzano Mountains, the lake had diverse fauna, including cutthroat trout. It appears to have formed when a river system broke up. It reached a maximum water level (highstand) presumably during the Illinoian glaciation and subsequently fluctuated between a desiccated basin and fuller stages. Wind-driven erosion has excavated depressions in the former lakebed that are in part filled with playas (dry lake beds). The lake was one of several pluvial lakes in southwestern North America that developed during the late Pleistocene. Their formation has been variously attributed to decreased temperatures during the ice age and increased precipitation; a shutdown of the thermohaline circulation and the Laurentide Ice Sheet altered atmospheric circulation patterns and increased precipitation in the region. The lake has yielded a good paleoclimatic record. This map shows the shoreline of Lake Estancia at three different periods: early Estancia (1,939 m / 6,362 ft above sea level), late Estancia (1,897 m / 6,224 ft), and "Lake Willard" (1,870 m / 6,135 ft). Present-day populated places, county boundaries and roads are overlaid on the map for identification.Map credit: Tom Fish

Archive – More featured pictures...

Travelogue...[edit]

I'm from the which, for better and for worse, is in the , the and also the and I've been to or lived...
...for this long...	...in these countries...	...and these places...
Just passing through
A few days
5 days +
10 days +
15 days +
3 weeks +
3 months +
3 years +
Idea and layout pilfered from Lcarsdata, who took it from NeilTarrant, who purloined it from A bit iffy, who half-inched it from Calton, who filched it from Salsb, who stole it from Guettarda, who borrowed it from White Cat.

Just a bit of fun... 2006 World Cup[edit]

Round of 16

Quarter-finals

Semi-finals

Final

24 June - Munich

Germany

3

30 June - Berlin

Sweden

1

Germany (pen)

0 (4)

24 June - Leipzig

Argentina

0 (3)

Argentina

2

4 July - Dortmund

Portugal

0

Germany

2

26 June - Kaiserslautern

Tunisia

1

Ghana

3

30 June - Hamburg

Croatia (AET)

4

Croatia

1

26 June - Cologne

Tunisia

2

France

1

9 July - Berlin

Tunisia (AET)

2

Germany

2

25 June - Stuttgart

England (AET)

4

England

3

1 July - Gelsenkirchen

Poland

1

England (AET)

3

25 June - Nuremberg

Ivory Coast

2

Mexico

1

5 July - Munich

Ivory Coast

2

England

2

27 June - Dortmund

Brazil

1

Third place

Brazil

2

1 July - Frankfurt

8 July - Stuttgart

Czech Republic

1

Brazil

1

Brazil

2

27 June - Hannover

Spain

0

Tunisia (AET)

3

Spain (pen)

1 (3)

Switzerland

1 (2)

Mmm, an intriguing set of predictions... does my mind really think that this could happen? Of course, any similarities between one of the scorelines here and that of the 1966 World Cup Final are purely coincidental. And somewhat optimistic as well.