Eugene Volokh has another puzzle, this time about European country names. Quick, go look at it before I quibble with one of his answers!
Okay.
In the answer, he writes:
Finland (Suomi).... Serbia and Montenegro (Srbija-Crna Gora) doesn't quite qualify largely because of the Serbia/Srbija, but also partly because Montenegro is actually a literal translation of the words "black mountain," which is what Crna Gora means in the local language (not sure how that fits within the terms of my question).
It turns out that 'Finland' is almost a direct translation of 'Suomi'. Finnish 'suo' means 'swamp' and 'suomi' is an archaic way of saying 'swampy'. English gets 'Finland' not from 'land of the Finns' although that is its current interpretation, but rather as a corruption of 'Fenland', the land of the fens, or swamps.
Does Finland then deserve to be stricken from the list? I think not. It's not a modern language translation, as is Montenegro -> Crna Gora.
But I wonder if Crna Gora is excluded in part because Prof. Volokh is a native speaker of Russian, and it's obvious to him that 'Crna Gora' means black mountain because, well, 'Cern -y -a -e' means black and 'Gora' means hill or mountain. (Incidentally, it's a bit of a stretch from Czech 'hora' -- you have to know that 'H' becomes 'G' as you go east in the Slavic language zone.)
Here's Daniel Wientraub's brief analysis of Arnold Schwarzenegger's tax returns from 2000 and 2001 (link via the corner on NRO). Apparently Arnold is personally responsible for $700,000 of the drop in revenue between 2000 to 2001. Probably more if you count his business ventures. Work harder, Arnold! We need to tax you!
But Arnold is not alone. In 2000 we earned all of our revenue in California, but in 2001 we were transitioning to Canada and by 2002 our Calif-based company posted a slight loss. So we too are contributing to California's budget crisis. We're outsourcing high-tech jobs to Canada.
Ooh, I feel like such a dirty capitalist.
A busy week, in which I posted very little. Let me recap.
On Monday we went to the Heritage Day festival. Best Baklava was at the Turkish pavillion. The Arab pavillion was out of baklava, and the substitution was poor. Another point for the Turks: real Turkish coffee (2 tickets).
Returning to the bad weed theme of last week, my wife reported that she'd been unable to stay in the first porta-potty she entered, on account of it having just been used as a hotbox (page will refresh bizarrely in newer browsers).
On Wednesday I was laid low by some sort of disease. My pregnant wife, recovering from her own bout with the same thing, had to care for me. Luckily this is not very taxing: 1.5 L of coffee, over the course of the day, and a slug of whiskey at night helped me recover. Thursday we worked again.
Friday night we went to the Edmonton Folk Festival. I hadn't been looking forward to it. As we got off the bus, we heard the objectionable Dan Bern singing about 9/11 complete with an exaggerated Texas accent for the "dubya bits". It seemed to confirm my worst fears about the folk festival. (Later I learned that it's supposed to be a non-political weekend. Somebody tell Bern.)
But we went in anyway. We made a deal: if either of us said, "Let's go", we would just get up and go. No discussion or arguing, just leaving. It was my idea, and I think a good one, because it kept me from saying "Let's go" without meaning it.
We went back again yesterday, with my niece who's visiting for a couple of weeks. She was bored, we were reasonably happy. I even sat through a whole hour of "comedy" including four more songs by Dan Bern... but the other acts in that set made it worthwhile, especially Ben Sures.
We picked up some CD's at the end, too.
Anyway, that was my week and my weekend too. Now it's time to start back on the hard work. Ear to the grindstone and all that.