on good ideas (forgive me the lack of modesty)

the best idea i've had in the last five years was to write this blog exclusively in english. some of my friends moaned about it -they would have to put more effort into reading me if they wanted to understand me. or they wouldn't understand shit of what i was talking about, and so they wouldn't waste their time paying me a visit. but it was a great idea. more than three years later, i can feel that my written english has improved quite a lot. of course, warcraft and my job have also played a decisive role, but this blog has been here for quite a long time, and quite unchangeable, now that i think of it.

and it was good for me to improve my written (and therefore, spoken) english, but also to improve my vocabulary. and my general knowledge. take last post as an example. i knew what i wanted to write (just don't ask me the true meaning of my words, for i shall not reveal it; business as usual) in portuguese, but i was missing some words. namely, the word scavenger. so i thought, how do i refer to an animal who feeds on dead bodies hunted by other predators? what's the damned word? then i thought, okay, vultures are among that kind of animals. so i logged into wikipedia, and searched for "vulture". bingo: 

"Vultures are scavenging birds, feeding mostly on the carcasses of dead animals."

so there's the word: scavenging. from scavenger. ten points for my vocabulary. then i kept reading the article on vultures - i could spend countless hours reading wikipedia, really - and i learned, for example, that the decline of vultures has led to hygiene issues on india. or that a group of vultures is called a kettle. see, learned something. could give countless examples to illustrate this theory. but i'll just add, my next blog must be in french.