Random entertaining links

I don't know who Valerie Valdes is, but she definitely has a point here:

Every time I hear someone complain that my book is unreadable because it has too much Spanish, I think two things:
1) At a guess, less than 1% of my novel is Spanish, and most of that is cussing. Por favor.
2) Ennyn Durin Aran Moria: pedo mellon a minno.

And yes, I did look up the passage in Tolkien, and yes, the bits with Gandalf trying to figure out the instructions and noting to the impatient Boromir that the doors opened outwards did remind me that it was too long since I'd watched The Doctor's Wife:

IDRIS: You're like a nine year old trying to rebuild a motorbike in his bedroom. And you never read the instructions.
ELEVENTY: I always read the instructions.
IDRIS: There's a sign on my front door. You have been walking past it for seven hundred years. What does it say?
ELEVENTY: That's not instructions.
IDRIS: There's an instruction at the bottom. What does it say?
ELEVENTY: Pull to open.
IDRIS: Yes. And what do you do?
ELEVENTY: I push.
IDRIS: Every single time. Seven hundred years. Police Box doors open out the way.

I don't know who Danny Bate is either, but this also entertained me:

*udrós 'water' was a PIE adjective

this led to English 'otter', as well as the words for 'otter' in Sanskrit (udrá), Latin (lutra) and Slavic (e.g. Czech vydra)

but, in Greek, it became húdrā 'water snake', origin of the mythological Hydra

yes, 'Hydra' and 'otter' are cognates