Southpaw

• Southpaws are so-called because ballparks, in being designed to have the sun out of the batter's eye in the afternoon, are arranged with left-handed pitchers' throwing arms always facing south. It has nothing to do with lefties propensity for being submarine pitchers, or lefty pitchers coming from the southern states.
• Chinese ESL speakers sometimes confuse "he" and "she," referring to women as "he" and vice versa. The difficulty stems from the Chinese word for he and she being exactly the same (ta). In discussion today, someone repeatedly kept calling the lady sitting beside her "he" this, "he" that. No one said anything as we understood what the speaker meant; the sense of lack of regard for gender was actually kind of cool.
• Canada can have terrorist problems, too. It will be interesting to see how shootings at the state house in Ottawa changes Canada's participation in the war on terror inside their country and abroad.