We know a true Mario fan when we see one. They hum the Super Mario Bros. background music on repeat, daydream about collecting gold coins and 1-UP mushrooms, and want nothing more than to traverse the Mushroom Kingdom with Luigi, Toad, and Yoshi to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser. To celebrate our favorite mustachioed plumber-turned-racer on his special day—MAR10 Day—we’ve collaborated with the team at Nintendo to let Mario accompany you on all of your driving adventures on Google Maps this week.
To get started, you’ll need to first update your app from Google Play or the App Store. Next, simply click on the yellow “?” icon found on the bottom right of your Google Maps app on Android or iOS. You’ll then see a prompt to enable Mario Time!
Once enabled, you’ll see that the navigation arrow has morphed into—who else?—Mario. He’ll be a constant companion wherever you’re driving this week—to work, to school, or the spaghetti house. Just remember to practice safe driving on the road—we don’t encourage throwing bananas or red shells at other drivers in real life!
Ready to take a drive with Mario? He’ll start rolling out on Maps globally today, and will join you on your road trips for a week. Take a screenshot of your route and share it with @GoogleMaps on Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #MarioMaps. But remember, make sure to avoid sharing personal details like your home or work address (seriously, think before you post). Let's-a go!
Mormon missionaries are expanding their online teaching efforts. “The world is changing and so the way we do missionary work is changing,” said the Church’s Young Women general president.
LOL, awwwwwkward... John McNamee of Pie Comic drew this amusing comic about the expected obligations of a princess being rescued by the "valiant" knight who slayed the dragon...
Arika Okrent is one of my favorite writers. She’s a linguist who specializes in breaking down experientially rich but conceptually knotty problems in language for a lay audience. For the last few years she’s been writing for Mental Floss — see “The Evolution of ‘Two’,” this short essay on Plains Indian Sign Language, or especially her series of YouTube videos, of which the bit on irregular verbs up top is one.
Anyways, now she’s contributing to Curiosity, and one of her first essays is on the history and structure of that most irregular and polysemic of English verbs, “to be.”
Most verbs stay basically the same in different grammatical roles. “Walk” looks like “walks” and “walked.” But the word “be” looks nothing like the word “am,” which looks nothing like the word “were.” This unusual circumstance came to be over thousands of years and can be traced back to an ancient ancestor of English.
That ancestor had three different verbs that gave rise to the different forms. “Am” and “is” go back to one of them. “Be,” “being,” and “been” go back to another verb meaning “to become” or “grow.” “Was” and “were” go back to yet another verb meaning “remain” or “stay.” Over thousands of years, these concepts and forms coalesced into a verb with a single identity, but hundreds of specific meanings.
Lucky guy. Whenever I tried this maneuver, it only lead to sex.
