Sugar Scrub

I am reading Andy Clarke’s Transcending CSS, and in it he encourages looking for Web design inspiration in places other than the Web: cereal boxes, newspapers, magazines, buildings, to name a few. (This is something I’ve done for some time now, but I’ve been making a more conscious effort of late, given his advice.)

This morning I picked up a tube of my wife’s facial scrub. I looked for anything interesting in the design on the front. Then I looked at the back, which contains, among other things, an ingredient list. I wasn’t scanning the ingredient list as much as my eyes just happened to fall on one word:

Saliva.

Saliva! They put saliva in facial scrub? I looked again.

Salvia.

Salvia officinalis (sage) leaf extract. Ah, helps to keep reading past the line break.

Arden, Hannah, Whatever

Our two-year-old has finally begun to talk and build a vocabulary. Folks who know about this kind of thing tell me that the American English R is one of the most difficult sounds for kids to learn to enunciate.

As you can imagine then, Whitby has a difficult time pronouncing his older sister’s name, Arden. So he pronounces it “Hannah.” A natural and logical approximation, I’m sure you’ll agree.