The various book newsgroups usually provide me with fodder for my daily griping and little else. While I post books for sale, I have only once sold a book to someone who found it on the newsgroup, and in that case it was to a customer I had known previously. Much of the traffic seems to be in the "What's Spam?" or "Should I trust customers from France?" or "How does one abbreviate 'page'?" vein. Samantha has had it with listening to me gripe about what a bunch of boobs the other booksellers are, so I try to keep it to myself. Just when I think the newsgroup has hit a new low ("how does one abbreviate 'page'?), I find a truly useful piece of information passed on by some like-minded soul who must also be gritting his teeth at most of the pablum that gets served up.

Today, it was a story from The Economist on the persistence of Latin in today's world. Buried within the story is news of a weekly Latin Radio show produced by the Finnish Broadcasting Company. Nuntii Latini, is a five minute news digest, spoken entirely in Latin. Since some of the news they announce is local to Finland, the show includes a strange mix of Latin and Finnish.