Boise Ed sends this in. [Бојси Ед го испраќа ова]
“The modern Macedonian alphabet consists of 31 letters, including 5 vowels (А, Е, И, О, У) and 26 consonants, with six letters unique to Macedonian: Ѓ (gj), Ѕ (dz), Ј (j), Љ (lj), Њ (nj), and Ќ (kj). It was officially codified in 1945 by a commission in Yugoslav Macedonia….Spoken as a first language by around 1.7 million people, it serves as the official language of North Macedonia.[” (Wikipedia)
Six unique letters in a written language that’s the primary language of only 1.7 million people. In the age of computers, that’s a fairly easily solvable problem by designing a font. One wonders, though, how this worked back in the typewriter era. I get the implication that perhaps they used a Cyrillic typewriter with combinations of letters, such as the Cyrillic version of kj for Ќ.
A bit of information omitted.
Speaking of Great Blue Herons, there’s a rookery near me. You can see the nests high up in the trees — about as high up as they could put them, considering the males are about 5 lb and the females about 3 lb, plus the weight of the nest and the eggs / hatchlings. The rookery is persistent — it’s been in the same location at least 5 years now. The arrival of the young roughly coincides with the trees getting covered with leaves, so the nests can’t easily be seen.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I was a bit confused about the Finnish hot dogs. I was trying to make this a ploy by the vendor, saying he is serving them Finnish style – but couldn’t follow the marketing concept. “Come and get yer franks, cold in the snow, the way the Finns enjoy ’em!”
But maybe it is more sensible if we grant them some self-awareness and they have self-identities that involve being Finnish. So they like to rest in the sauna for a while, then jump into the chill. ?
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Mitch4, yes, that’s something Finns are known for: a good steam in the sauna, some self-flagellation with a vihta (birch twigs), and then a naked roll in the snow.
When I was much younger, I hung out at a friend’s parents’ farm on weekends. One of his mum’s sisters was dating a Finn, who built a sauna out of an old shack on the farm. I think I still have some scarring from sitting on the porch one morning, somewhat hung over, and seeing a huge, naked Finn appear out of the shack and dive into a snowbank!
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